The fighting mascot, the true story of a boy soldier

NYPL RESEARCH LIBRARIES

Ion?

FKjHTING MASCO'

3 3433 08234880 0

^•^■^'1

tommy'" KEHOB

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/fightingmascottrOOkeho

k

N^■;

o

THE FIGHTING MASCOT

THE KEV^ YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX
TILDZN FOUNDATION- *

I had got him! I had got him!

{Fage 35)

THE
FIGHTING MASCOT

THE TRUE STORY OF A BOY SOLDIER

BY
THE BOY SOLDIER HIMSELF
THOMAS JOSEPH KEHOE

Rfm., No. 203144, 5th King's Liverpool Regiment

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

CLYDE FORSYTHE

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1918

:N YORK

f;^blic library
838101

ASTOR. LENOX AND

Li

Copyright, 1918
By DODD, mead and COMPANY, Inc.

VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY

BINaHAMTON AND N£W YORK

FOREWORD

Bit by hit I've told this story of my adventures to
recruiting meetings and Red Cross rallies and to lads
I've met here and there on land and sea — told what-
ever scrap of it came into my head and let the rest
go for another time.

I never coidd piece it all together the way it ought
to he, arid I was never a good hand at the writing.
So I've found a writing man who knows a thing or
tivo about how to straighten it all out and how to put
the first part at the beginning and the last part at
the end and the fighting and the talking and the rest
in where they belong, while he drops what don't mat-
ter much into his scrap basket.

He's dropped more into that basket than I wanted
him to, some fine songs I wrote for him from my own
head having gone there; but the story's all here, with
the hard words spelled right, and everything clear
and sensible, which is more than ever I could have
done myself.

Thomas Joseph Kehoe, Rfm.

P.S. — The writing man's name is E. L. Bacon, if
anybody should wish to know.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Squeezing in Through the Band ... 1

II Into the Big Noise 9

III In Dead Men's Alley 17

IV The Colonel Gets a Warning .... 23
V The Germans Come 30

VI The Lost Patrol 40

VII Ghosts of the Night 49

VIII Heroes and Cowards 57

IX "Hard Luck" Prophesies Again ... 66

X "Give 'Em the Bayonet !" 74

XI It's the Fighting Fifth 84

XII The Mad Woman of Ypres 93

XIII Soldiers Three 100

XIV Bombs 108

XV Groping in the Dark 113

XVI The Low-Down Cur 119

XVII Bonesey Becomes a Hero 126

XVIII The Man from America 134

XIX On the March 140

XX Sinking in the Bog 146

XXI The Battle of Flanders 154

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

XXII Victims of the Huns 163

XXIII An Enemy Leaves Us 171

XXIV The Fight in the Stone House . . . 176
XXV An Olp Pal "Goes West'' 189

XXVI Into the Trenches Again 200

XXVII I Meet "Israel Hands" 207

XXVIII "Good-Bye, Old Pals!" 215

XXIX I Meet the King 223

XXX The Last Adventure 229

ILLUSTRATIONS

I had got him! I had got him! (Page 35) Frontispiece

PACING
PAGE

One of our lads brought the butt of a gun down on

his head 78

I felt the mud pulling me down 152

"Put the steel to 'im ! Put the steel to 'im !" . . . 182

THE FIGHTING MASCOT

THE FIGHTING MASCOT

CHAPTER I

SQUEEZING IN THROUGH THE BAND

I'M glad I never could learn to play a bugle.
If ever I had caught the trick of it I should
be blowing it yet, with never a look-in at the
fighting.

*^If we was fightin' the Germans with
chunes,'' the Bandmaster told me, *^we'd have
ye in the front trenches, me lad, and there ^d be a
Hun drop dead every time ye gave a toot. ' '

I got to the front trenches all right, but not
with a bugle. I carried a gun. I was three
years too young for the firing line — just turned
sixteen at my first battlei — but the Colonel
couldn't stand my bugling any longer.

I was a Liverpool lad before I went to war.
There's good seafaring blood in my veins, and
I might have gone to sea myself. But my
mother would say:

^* Stick to the dry land, Tom. Your father

1

2 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

was a sailor man, and now he's gone to the
bottom, and his ship with him. Stick to the dry
land, my lad. There's too many dangers at
sea.''

So I've stuck to it. But I've been through
more dangers on land and been closer to death
a hundred times than ever I should have been
on the water. There 's a bullet hole in my thigh
and the scar from the butt of a German's gun
on my head, and I should never have got them
if I had followed the sea, the days of pirates
being over.

My mother and my step-father live at 15
Amelia Street, and the windows of our home
look out over the big pier's head on the River
Mersey, where the liners come in. There's
a little room up under the roof in that house
where many's the night I've sat propped up in
bed reading '^Treasure Island" by candle light.
I'll not soon forget the awful shock it gave me
when my mother would glide in and take the
candle away just when the pirates were doing
their worst.

I read that grand old book so many times
that I shouldn 't wonder if I could recite it back-
ward if I tried. The more I read it the more

SQUEEZING 3

I longed to sail away with a ship and see the
world. But, remembering what my mother had
said, I made up my mind that I should have to
look for my adventures on land if there were
any for me to find at all. If only I had lived
in the days of Jim Hawkins and Long John
Silver there would have been plenty of them,
but I was afraid I had been born about one
hundred and fifty years too late for such things.

That's what I was thinking just before the
big war broke loose, which brought more ad-
ventures than Jim Hawkins ever dreamed of.
But how could I know the war was coming?

I meant to get into that war, even though I
was too young. It was too good to miss, and
there might not be another in a life-time. I
had blown a bugle a few times — just about
enough to make a noise through it — and I
thought that if they weren't very particular
about how the music sounded I might get into
the band of the Fifth King's Liverpool Eegi-
ment, where Billy Clegg, who lived almost next
door to us, was a rifleman. That would be a
step to getting into the fighting ranks.

I managed it without much trouble, and went
with the battalion to Camp Oswestry, the train-

4 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

ing camp near Cardiff. Nobody asked me
whether I was much of a bugler and there was
no reason why I should tell them. They would
find out soon enough. And they did. The
Colonel said I was the worst bugler in the serv-
ice of the King, and what the Bandmaster said
was even worse.

By that time some of the riflemen wanted me
as a mascot to bring them luck, and they did
their best to help me get into the ranks. I
weighed only ninety-six pounds and my height
was only four feet ten, so it was hard to con-
vince the Colonel that I was big enough, but
the more he heard my bugling the more he
seemed to like the idea of my carrying a gun.
And at last he made a rifleman of me. I had
to throw in three years to my age for good
measure. I hope I may be forgiven for that
one, for my mother brought me up to tell the
truth. Anyway, it was in a good cause.

In May, 1917, a batch of men was being made
up for France, and our battalion was chosen.
I took the train for Liverpool to say good-bye
to my mother and my step-father and my
friends.

It was hard at home to say good-bye, for my

SQUEEZING 5

mother cried over me and said she couldn't see
why I wanted to go and fight at my age and
come home with bullet holes through me and
that it had been better had I gone to sea. But
she screwed up her courage when it came time
for me to go, and when I left the house she came
running after me, threw her arms around me
and tried to keep back the tears. As I marched
down the street she stood in the door and cried
after me words that came into my mind many
a time after that:

*^Be brave, have faith in God — and come back
home!''

That night we crossed England on the train,
and the following morning rolled into Folke-
stone on the Channel. It was May 16, 1917 —
my sixteenth birthday. That day we sailed for
France.

At the end of the first day's march toward
the front there came a drizzling rain. A few
hundred yards back from the road an old barn
stood on the side of a hill, and it seemed to me
it was just the kind of lodging I wanted. I
found the door closed, and when I tried to open
it a chorus of voices cried out:

*^No room! No room! Get out!"

6 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

The Tommies were wedged in so close they
were almost sleeping on top of one another.

I prowled around to the rear, where I found a
dog house built against the wall. I took off my
pack, got down on liands and knees and began
to creep in. Suddenly a man 's foot was planted
on top of my head and shoved me back.

^^Well, blind me eyes!'' somebody croaked
inside. **I thought it was the dog come back.
Welcome to me 'umble 'ome, ye little swab.
Come in.''

It was so dark inside that I couldn't see him
at first, but as he seemed to ])e lying full length
and as the dog house wasn't nmch more than
five feet long I knew he couldn't be very big,
especially as there was plenty of room for me
alongside him.

** Seems just like 'ome, matey," he said.
**Many's the night in my young days in the old
country I've slept in a dog 'ouse."

I thought, * ' This chap must have been a tramp
before he joined the army." I asked him if
the dogs never objected.

**I never knew 'em not to," he answered.
*'But I'm deatli on dogs, matey. A bloke in
my trade can't spend much time arguin' with

SQUEEZING 7

'em. He's got to know 'ow to settle 'em.''

^^ What's your trade?" I asked.

*^Well, matey, a sort of a night worker's job
was mine. Detective Martin, from Scotland
Yard, who's now in A Company, could tell you
a thing or two about wot I did. Knows all
about me. Been keepin' an eye on me hever
since we left England. Did you never 'ear of
Bonesey? Well, that's me."

Yes, I had heard of him, and I began to wish
I hadn't crept into that dog house. The men
in A Company had been talking about Bonesey
only that day. They said he had been one of
the cleverest housebreakers in England.

My eyes were getting used to the dark and I
took a look at him. His name certainly suited
him, for he didn 't seem to be much but skin and
bones, though he looked healthy enough and
as if he might be as strong as iron, as some
bony men are. He was a middle-aged chap,
whose hair was turning gray. He had sharp
little eyes, a hard mouth, and an old scar lay
across his nose. I thought that with a dark
lantern in one hand and a pistol in the other
he must have been a desperate looking lad when
doing his housebreaking.

8 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

That night I dreamed that Bonesey had crept
into my room at home and was holding a gun at
my head.

Next day we were together on the march, and
from that day on through six months of fighting
we were pals.

CHAPTER II

INTO THE BIG NOISE

THE next day we passed through little vil-
lages where houses and churches had been
torn with shells. Sometimes there would be
nothing left of a village but ruins, with not a
living thing in sight except now and then a
lonely cat or dog.

The noise of the guns was growing louder
and louder. Boom! boom! boom! Even the
ground seemed to shake. By afternoon we
heard for the first time the rattle of machine
guns. Typewriters was the name we learned
for them after we got to the trenches, and they
sound just enough like them to make a chap
think of some girl pounding the keys in an office
back home.

Back home ! Oh, home and mother ! Was I
ever going to see them again!

We knew when we heard the clickety-click
of those typewriters that we were getting very
near. I began to feel afraid. I couldn't help

9

10 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

it. I felt myself shaking; I could hardly hold
my rifle. Billy Matchett, who was marching
next to me, laughed. He had nerves of iron,
that lad. The noise of the guns made him
more and more cheerful the louder it grew. But
there were other men — big chaps, too — ^who
were shaking more than I was. They were as
white as sheets, and one of them fainted and
dropped in the road. He was a poor lad the
Tommies had been calling '* Windy Dick'' be-
cause he had been frightened ever since we left
England. Windy is a word in the trenches to
describe a chap who is nervous and jumpy un-
der fire.

But Windy Dick was a good enough sort at
heart. He just couldn't help being afraid.
While we were crossing the Channel he thought
of nothing but submarines, and he had begun to
shake the very first day we heard the guns.
He had been shaking ever since. When I saw
him drop I felt sorry for him and thought of
what he had said to me one day on the march :

^^ Tommy" — and his voice was shaking even
then — ^^I hope I get shot before I'm caught run-
ning away or doing anything like that. It isn't
that I'm not willing to die if I have to. It's the

INTO THE BIG NOISE 11

fear of disgracing myself that worries me. I
just can^t help being afraid. It's my nerves.''

We left the poor chap for the water carts to
pick up. He was going to have all the chance
in the world to show himself a man later on.

It was queer, but the sight of Windy and those
other frightened lads braced me up, and the
shaky feeling left me after a time.

Once we got a glimpse of Ypres, far off — a
ghostly lot of ruins; broken steeples, roofless
houses, tumbling walls. Beyond it was a stretch
of open ground without a tree or even a blade
of grass, for the shells had ploughed up every
inch of earth and pitted it with holes. Way off
were low hills, half covered with patches of
woods.

I thought they were going to send us right
into the fighting at the end of that day, but they
didn't. Instead we slept beside the road, while
our ears buzzed with a noise like the pounding
of a thousand boiler makers on sheet iron. Yet
with all that clatter most of the lads went
sound asleep as soon as they were curled in their
blankets, and didn't wake till morning.

But Billy Clegg, Billy Matchett, old Bonesey
and I cuddled up together and talked things

12 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

over. Three of us were pals already and nat-
urally got together whenever we had a chance
and needed a little consolation, but Bonesey,
who hadn't been in the same company with us
till we got to Boulogne, was a brand-new chum.
He seemed to take a liking to us, and he was
about as hard to lose as a cootie after that.

Before long the two Billies fell asleep, but
Bonesey was a night owl and it was a long time
before he stopped talldng and dropped off. As
for me, I was on the edge of the biggest adven-
ture a boy could ever hope to find, and I lay
thinking about it half the night, listening to the
guns and watching the rockets and the shells
against the black sky.

In the morning the first thing I heard was the
voice of Billy Clegg saying:

' ' I got some straw down my neck. I can 't get
it out.''

Then I discovered that I had a prickly feeling
myself and began to dig for it. All around me
the lads were doing the same thing.

^^ Straw!" said the Sergeant. '^Why, that
ain't straw you blighters have got. It's coot-
ies."

And he was right. We all had them — the lit-

INTO THE BIG NOISE 13

tie crawlers that get into every soldier's clothes
as soon as he gets to the front and stick to him
like a loving brother till he gets back to Blighty.
I wonder if Jim Hawkins had those things. I
hadn 't counted on them when I went adventure
hunting.

Before the sun set that day I had gone into
the greatest bit of adventure a boy could ever
hope to find, for that afternoon we filed into
the trenches.

Frightened! Oh, I'll admit it. So was
Billy Clegg. I'm not so sure about Bonesey.
He kept his mouth shut and looked as serious
as an undertaker, and there was no telling how
he felt. Billy Matchett was the only one of us
who didn't change a bit, no matter how close
the shells came. He went in humming a tune.

We relieved the Black Watch, w^ho had been
there for weeks and who didn 't like the place a
bit. They said it was one of the worst positions
on the front — the dirtiest trenches, the biggest
rats, the liveliest cooties and the hardest fight-
ing.

'^I feel a bit sorry for you poor blokes," said
the big Black Watch trench guide who took us
in. ^* After you've been in this blooming hell-

14 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

hole as long as we have you'll be glad enough
to get out. Keep your heads down, you pop-
eyed blighters, if you don 't want Fritzie to drill
holes through you. ' '

Those Black Watch lads made me open my
eyes, I can tell you. Grimy they were as if they
had been wallowing in mud for a year, and some
had scars from knives or bayonets or bullets
across their faces. Their regiment was famous
already, for it had been through some of the
hottest fighting of the war. Veterans, every
one of them, these lads, who had seen more ter-
rible things than I had ever dreamed of, who
had killed Germans by the hundreds, who had
had more wonderful escapes from death than
they could remember. And here I was in their
trenches chumming with them — with the heroes
I had heard of so often — and one of a regiment
come to take their places. It was a strange
world, sure enough. Anything might come
true after that.

Bonesey nudged me as we filed along.

*'Say, Mascot," he whispered; ^^IVe seen
'ard-lookin' blokes in my time but never the like
of these. Wy, that big lad that's leadin' us
'asn't 'ad a bath in ten years, and, blimey, if I

INTO THE BIG NOISE 15

don't believe 'e was a murderer before 'e joined
the army from the looks of 'im. How'd yon
like to meet a chap like that alone in a dark
alley, nowT'

Bonesey was a hard-looking blighter himself,
but he looked as sweet as an angel beside those
Black Watchers.

I hadn't been in the trenches half an hour
before I forgot my fear. It seemed to be a
fairly safe place, after all. Shells were flying
overhead, and now and then a bullet plunked
into the parapet, but hidden down there I didn't
see any pressing need for worry.

That's what I was thinking, when suddenly
a fine young lad jumped to the firing step to
get a look at the Germans. He lifted head and
shoulders above the top, and looked over. Just
below him I stood staring up at him, wonder-
ing at his recklessness. I saw him wave his cap,
like the poor, innocent rookie he was, and I
heard a sergeant roar at him to come down.
He did come down, that very instant, falling
backward almost on top of me, with a bullet
hole in his head.

The sight turned me half sick with fear and
horror. He was the first man I have ever seen

16 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

killed, and though IVe seen hundreds dead and
dying since that time I shall never forget the
way he came tumbling down in a heap at my
feet, without a cry or a groan. You never for-
get the first dead man ; afterward there are too
many to remember.

The Black Watch went away to a well-earned
rest before long and their trenches became ours.
But the lad who had led us in hung on for a time
to tell us a few more pleasant things about
what we might expect. The more he told us
the sadder we grew, and the sadder he saw us
growing the worse became his story of what we
had come to.

CHAPTER III

MAKE your wills and say your prayers,"
said the big Black Watcher, ^ ' for if any
of you lads get out of this hole alive you'll be
lucky, I can tell you that. Dead Men's Alley
we Ve named it, for of all the blooming unlucky
spots on the line this bit of trench is the worst. ' '

Maybe we weren't a nervous lot when we
heard that! Ow! I felt cold and shaky all
over.

Something happened a few minutes later that
didn't make me feel any better, I can tell you.

There came a sound like a railroad train go-
ing through a tunnel with the engine whistle go-
ing. Then came a crash that seemed to shake
the whole trench, and not a hundred feet from
where I stood a black column of smoke shot up
to the sky. A shell had struck against our
sand-bags.

When the smoke cleared away I saw a man's
body hanging over our wires and another lying

17

18 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

across the parapet. Soon the news ran along
the line that three others had been struck by
pieces of the shell and badly wounded.

A thing that seemed strange to us, who were
new to the queer ways of shells, was that a lad
who had been standing only two yards from the
explosion was not hurt nor even knocked off
his feet, though a man close beside him had
been blown out of the trench and was one of
those I had seen lying dead.

For the first few hours after the Black Watch
chap and his regiment of grimy old veterans
left us it didn^t take much to make us think
the Germans were coming. Sometimes one of
us would believe he smelled gas and we would
grab for our masks. If the German typewrit-
ers rattled a little louder than usual our offi-
cers would imagine they were getting ready for
a raid and would call every man of us to the
firing step. The first time I got there I found
I couldn't reach to the top, so I got a sand bag
and stood on it. That made me just high
enough to see over and shoot.

But the first Hun we saw came from another
direction than we expected. With a loud buzz-
ing noise he dropped down on us in his airplane

IN DEAD MEN'S ALLEY 19

right out of the sky and swooped along our
trench not a hundred feet above our heads, pep-
pering us with lead as he went. One man was
killed not ten feet from where I stood and sev-
eral more dropped not very far away.

I had often wondered what it was going to be
like to be under fire and had never once thought
that I shouldn't have the nerve to face it. But
when I saw that lad fall dead almost at my side
while the shadow of that big, buzzing monster
was creeping along the trench the old shaky
feeling got hold of me again and I was as weak
as a baby. I crouched in the bottom of the
trench and covered my e^^es to shut out the
sight of the horrible thing overhead, and I
thought of No. 15 Amelia Street and of what
a safe, cosy, comfortable home it was. Oh, that
little room of mine at home, and ' ' Treasure Is-
land ' ' by candle light !

It was all over in a moment. The buzzing
noise died away and the stretcher bearers were
coming through the trench after the dead and
wounded.

I got to my feet and looked about to make
sure nobody had noticed me. The men I saw
were too busy watching the sky to pay any at-

20 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

tention to what might be going on in the trench.
I looked up. There, far above us, the Hun
was being attacked by one of our own flyers.

They circled round and round each other,
firing all the time, and then Fritzie broke away
and flew off as fast as he could go, our man
giving him a hot chase.

A big, black thunder cloud was rolling up
from the East and Fritzie made for it. In a
moment they had both disappeared inside of it.
While we watched for them we could hear the
thunder bellow and see flashes of lightning.
They had gone right into the heart of the storm.

Then came a streak of liglitning that blinded
us, and in the same instant out of the spot from
which the flash had come an airplane, disabled
and helpless, dropped as straight as a rock over
the German lines.

Whether it was our man or Fritzie we had no
way of knowing, but a moment later the other
plane came swooping out of the storm and cir-
cled easily down behind our trenches. Then we
knew it was Fritzie who had lost the fight and
you should have heard the cheers that our men
sent up. Even the Germans heard them way

IN DEAD MEN'S ALLEY 21

off in their lines, and answered them with a
terrific rattling of their typewriters.

One of our sentries was killed a few minutes
later. I had a good look at him as they carried
him past us on a stretcher. He was a man I had
known at Oswestry, and he had been joking with
me only that morning. I had seen more than
one man die that day, but the sight of that lad
that I had known so well made death seem more
dreadful than ever before. I had heard him
speak of his mother and sisters he had left at
home, and I felt like crying when I thought of
them.

That night we crept into our dug-outs to sleep.
Next to me lay Billy Matchett.

^^Well, Mascot, '^ said Billy, ^^here we are in
it at last ; right into all that we Ve been dream-
ing about. Seems queer, don't it? Begin to
wish you were back home, don't you now?"

^ ^ Not yet, Billy, ' ' I answered. ^ ^ I want to see
the whole thing through. Then home will seem
like a good place to get back to for a while."

I meant every word of it, for the big adven-
ture was only just beginning then, but if any-
body had asked me the same question a month

22 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

or two later, after we had been shot at and
shelled and bombed and gassed and had slept
in mud and rain along the Flanders roads I
think I should have given a different answer.

CHAPTER IV

THE COLONEL GETS A WAKNING

THE Black Watcher had told us those were
the worst dug-outs he had ever been in. I
don't believe he exaggerated. They couldn't
have been worse. They were so small that only
four men could creep into one and they were
dirty and smelly. If the four men happened
to be big chaps they had to sleep almost on top
of one another, but I was so small that there
were really only three and a half in ours and,
one of them being Billy Matchett, who was long
and narrow, we had room to spare.

' ' Sleep tight, Mascot, ' ' said Billy. ' ' No tell-
ing how soon they'll call us out of this."

But how can a fellow sleep tight when a rat
runs over his face every five minutes? I had
no more than dropped off when the first one
came. The feet of a rat are the most horrible,
cold, clammy things in the world and when
they pattered right across my face I came wide
awake with a jump and a yell.

23

24 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

Up jumps Billy the same moment.

^ ^ Ow ! I say, Mascot ! I can ^t stand this, you
know. That thing was kissing me, that's what
he was/'

^ ^ Oh, let him kiss you ; what 's the difference 1 ' '
somebody growls in the dark.

All four of us grumble and squirm a while;
then we drop off.

^'Ow!'' It's Billy's voice again. ^'I say!
That rat's come back."

^^Pull your coat over your face and shut up."

Billy and I took the hint, and slept till the
Sergeant called us out.

That morning we heard that the Prussian
Guard had taken the places of the Saxons in
the trenches facing us and that we might ex-
pect trouble. Prussians always mean trouble.
They're the best fighters in the Kaiser's army
— the best, the meanest, the crudest.

The Fritzies' artillery and ^^typewriters"
were much busier after the Prussians arrived,
and our lads on the firing step didn't take any
chances in sticking their heads up any higher
than they had to.

A lad gets used to the ' ^ typewriters ' ' and the
rifles, but oh, those big guns! They sent all

THE COLONEL GETS A WARNING 25

kinds of stuff at us, but the whiz-bangs were the
worst. We called them that because of the
way they went — with a whiz and a bang. A
whiz-bang does a plucky lot of damage when it
strikes, and very often they struck much too
near to be pleasant. It made me nervous watch-
ing them and wondering how much would be left
of me if one should explode too close.

One of these things struck our cook house,
smashed it to pieces and killed every cook on
duty — five of them. Dinner was an hour late
that day. After that whenever the food wasn't
up to the mark some lad would be sure to say,
^'I'm thinking it's about time we had some more
cooks killed."

. Everybody had an idea that with all that fir-
ing the Prussians were getting ready to raid
us and to show us what kind of lads they were.
But there wasn't one of them to be seen all day
— not even a helmet popping up. I know now
why they didn't come; they had another^ kind
of a game in mind.

We had all heard, of course, of the miners, the
moles who spend all their time tunnelling deep
under No Man's Land with shovels and picks
hoping to plant a charge of dynamite under the

26 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

enemy's trench. We had seen some of our own,
who would disappear into dark holes and be
gone for hours. A story spread along the line
that the Germans' miners were digging under-
neath us and that we might expect to be blown to
the sky any minute. We didn't know w^hether
to believe it or not, but it wasn't good for our
nerves. As for me, I should rather have heard
the whole German army was coming at us than
to feel that we might be standing over a mine.

Along came Bonesey, looking glum as an owl.

^* What's the trouble, Bonesey, old boy?" I
sung at him, trying to cheer him a bit. ' ' You 're
not worrying about that mine f ' '

^^Mine be blowed! If one goes off under me
I'll never know it, so wot should I care? It's
this Scotland Yard lad that's on me nerves,
little man. When I joined the army I thought I
was goin' to be somewheres wdiere the police
wouldn't be botherin' of me, but that lad's got
'is eye on me hevery time I come within sight of
'im. Wot's he think I'm up to now — 'ouse-
breakin'?"

A Eoyal Welsh Fusilier, whose regiment held
the same line wdth ours, came along a moment
later and began to tell us of what had been going

THE COLONEL GETS A WAENING 27

on before we arrived. He had been in the war
ever since it started, and he told ns things that
made our eyes open. He told us how the Huns
tortured prisoners and women and children and
of horrible things he had seen with his own eyes.
From what we heard from him and later from
many others, too, I knew that the Huns had gone
mad, the whole race of them, that fighting them
was just like fighting savages and that it might
be better to be killed than to fall alive into their
hands. And I knew it not only from what I
heard but from what before long I saw myself ;
terrible things that sent cold shivers through
me and that I couldn't get out of my thoughts.
I would dream of them at night, and sometimes
I would wake up with a cry, thinking those fiends
had come to torture me.

^^We old timers don't take any prisoners,"
said the Welshman. '^Not after what we've
seen. After you've been in the trenches a
month, my boy, you'll find killing Huns is just
like killing vermin. You'll know the Lord is
glad every time you stick your bayonet into
one. ' '

I've heard stories of how the North Ameri-
can Indians tortured people, but they were not

28 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

as bad as what I heard and saw in Flanders.

That Welshman had heard about the mine,
too, and he told us it wouldn't surprise him if
the whole trench went up into the air before
long. He said the talk about the mine had been
going on for days and that all the officers had
heard it and had put our miners at work investi-
gating. The miners, he said, thought at first
that it might have been the rats that had started
the scare and that the sound caused by their
scurrying about in the dark had been mistaken
for the scraping and shovelling of underground
Germans. But he thought they must have given
up that idea, because they were still searching
for a tunnel.

^ ' But I 'm telling you, ' ' he said, ^ ' that getting
blowm up by a mine would be the pleasantest sort
of an end a Britisher could come to in this
plaguey spot.''

I've met more cheerful lads than that Welsh-
man. He was as solemn as a mourner at a
funeral, and he talked about nothing but trou-
ble. Five minutes with him would take the
laugh out of a laughing hyena. I felt glum for
the rest of the day. A mine right under my
feet, as likely as not, and a couple of hundred

THE COLONEL GETS A WARNING 29

yards away the worst fiends on earth waiting
for a chance to torture me. Nice place I had
come to.

That evening came an order to withdraw to
a trench in the rear, and we knew the mine
story must be true. We filed out through the
communication trenches, leaving the sentries to
keep guard until we were gone.

Fifteen minutes later came a crash and a
roar that staggered me. The whole world
seemed to be blowing to pieces. Smoke and
flame and flying earth filled the whole sky.
Then it came again and again. Boom! boom!
boom ! It was enough to burst our ear drums —
the most awful noise I had ever heard. Then
out of the great black smoke cloud the body of
a man was tossed a hundred feet into the air —
one of our own men who had stayed behind too
long.

We learned later that our miners had discov-
ered not ten minutes before the order came for
us to get out that the Germans were ready to
blow us up, and word had been sent to the Colo-
nel in a hurry. It's lucky the Colonel acted
promptly. The old boy could act as quick as
lightning when there was trouble in the wind.

CHAPTER V

THE GERMANS COME

THAT cloud of smoke had scarcely disap-
peared when the Germans opened up on
us with everything they had. Bullets and shells
were flying every^vhere. The whiz-bangs tore
gaps in our wire fences and in our sand-bag par-
apet. Showers of sand, earth and pebbles fell
over us and half blinded us. We lost some
men; how many I don't know, but I saw two
blown to pieces by a shell that dropped right
into the trench.

We four pals— Billy Clegg, Billy Matchett,
Bonesey and I — were squatting in the trench in
the dark, glad it wasn't our turn on the firing
step in all that fuss, when along came that same
funeral-faced Welshman.

^^I say, old 'Ard Luck," shouted Bonesey;
**wot's biting yer now?"

^'That mine was there all right," croaked
Welshie. ' ' Didn 't I tell you f And I 'm telling

30

THE GERMANS COME 31

you now that there's more trouble coming be-
fore long."

As he spoke we heard somebody shouting
orders down the trench.

^'Coming!" yelled Billy Clegg. *'Its' here
now ! ' ' And he jumped to his feet.

The same instant came the gas-mask signal.
I grabbed for mine. My hands were shaking so
I could hardly hold it, but there wasn't any time
to lose if I wanted to live. As I fumbled with
it I kept mumbling to myself, ' ' Fifteen seconds !
Fifteen seconds! One, two, three, four — "

According to instructions, fifteen seconds was
about the time allowed for a gas wave to arrive,
and if that mask wasn't adjusted properly by
the time I had counted fifteen then good-bye to
Tommy Kehoe.

I had got up to ten and was still fumbling,
when Welshie grabbed me and put the thing in
place on my head. Then we both jumped for
the firing step.

Not one hundred feet away a long, low fog
bank was creeping toward us close to the
ground. It was the gas wave. Our rockets
were shooting up through the dark, and in their
glare the wave turned yellow and red and green

32 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

as it rolled on. Behind it all was pitch black.
By the light of the rockets I could look along
our line of trench and see our lads in helmets
and masks stiff as statues, with their rifles
pointing over the parapet.

My mask was warm and stifling, and I felt
like pulling it off for a big breath of fresh air
before the wave should reach us, but I didn't
dare. I had heard of men who had taken
such a chance and who hadn't lived to tell of
it.

One moment the wave was sparkling white,
like phosphorescent surf on a sand-bar, the next
it gleamed green and red, like the deadly thing it
was. And it crept toward us, oh, so slowly.
Perhaps it was only ten seconds before it rolled
over the sand bags, but it seemed like ten times
as long.

Then it swept over us. I gasped for air. I
thought I was suffocating. I was sure there
was a hole in my mask somewhere and that it
was all over with me. But it wasn't as bad as
that. I was half stifled, but there was a lot
of life left in me, though the gas did get a few
fellows — knocked them flat.

There wasn't time to do any thinking about

THE GERMANS COME 33

the lack of air, for I saw something else rolling
toward us, way out in the dark. Another gas
wave, I thought. The fellows beside me were
•firing into it as fast as they could pull the trig-
gers and I got busy with my rifle too. But why
were they shooting at a wave 1

Then I saw what it was — not a gas wave but
a mass of charging men. And how they did
come! It seemed only an instant before they
were in plain view — hundreds of hooded Huns,
rushing on with fixed bayonets.

What marks they were, all massed together,
with the rockets throwing a glare over them!
We scarcely had to take aim. Our bullets were
sure to find them. I saw them fall, sometimes
groups of them going down together. The ma-
chine guns were mowing lanes right through
their ranks. Yet they never once stopped.
Again and again the gaps in their ranks closed
up. Always came more men from over there
in the dark to take the places of the dead and
wounded.

Not a hundred feet away they were when
our lads were jumping to the parapet to meet
them with their bayonets. I made a leap for
the top of the ladder, grabbed at it, missed and

34 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

slipped back. Somebody reached out a band
and pulled me up.

Almost on us tbey were. Ob, never in my
worst dreams — and IVe bad many a bad one
since tben — bave I seen a more dreadful sigbt
tban tbat. Tbey came at us out of the dark like
fiends from anotber world, like tbe pictures I've
seen of men from Mars, for tbeir beads were
covered witb tbe most devilisb-looking masks
tbat anybody could imagine, masks witb buge
round eyes and long, piggisb snouts. Sbells
were bursting above tbem, macbine guns were
tearing tbrougb tbeir ranks and tbeir masks
were wbite and gbastly in tbe ligbt of tbe rock-
ets. Many a time I bad tbougbt of wbat war
would be like, but never bad I tbougbt I sbould
look on sucb a sigbt as tbat.

^'Figbt or die, Tommy Keboe ! Figbt or
die!"

Tbat's wbat I told myself as I croucbed in
front of tbe sand bags, witb my bayonet ready
for tbem.

Wbopping big men tbey were, bead and shoul-
ders above me. But as I waited there a tbougbt
flashed through me of tbe Bantam regiment, lit-
tle fellows scarcely bigger than I, who had made

THE GERMANS COME 35

good against even those giant Prussians. Size
didn't count behind a bayonet. It was quick-
ness that counted. I was sure of it. If it didn't
then it was all over with me.

Even then, when they were almost up to us,
how the guns were mowing them down! It
looked as if none could be left in a moment or
two. But those that didn't fall came on like
madmen and poured through the lanes where
the big guns had levelled our wires.

One — he was a six-footer if he was an inch
— ran straight for me with his bayonet out. I
crouched and thrust at him — thrust upward.
His bayonet went over my shoulder. He stag-
gered and fell over my gun.

I had got him! I had got him! In the
stomach !

'Twas lucky for me there was no time to think
over it or to stand there gaping at the dead
Hun hanging over my gun with his masked
head almost touching me, for it was horrible.
For a second or two I turned dizzy and sick.
But it was fight again or die. I jerked my rifle
back and stumbled over the dead man as he
flopped to the ground.

**Make for their stomachs, Tommy Kehoe!

36 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

Make for their stomachs!" I told myself.
^^Size don't counf

A fellow was coming for me swinging his gun
above his head ready to strike me with the butt.
He frightened me. I hadn't counted on that
kind of fighting. Just then somebody stuck him
from behind with a bayonet and he fell.

There were more Huns coming and I thought
it was all up with us. But as I looked at them
again I saw that they were without their rifles
and that they were holding their hands above
their heads. They were surrendering. The
fight was over.

Yes, it was over, but dead and wounded men
were all about us, and we had lost many of our
own. I didn 't recognize any of them as they lay
there, for they were masked, but later I found
that lads I had known were missing. There was
much work for the stretcher bearers in front of
the trenches that night. Dangerous work it
was, too, for the Huns never stopped shooting
at them.

Before long a wind sprang up that blew the
gas away, and we pulled off our masks, glad to
breathe the fresh air again. Oh, how good that
fresh wind was in our faces ! We got together

THE GERMANS COME 37

in little groups and talked over the fight. One
lad named John Goldstein, from London, showed
us a steel breastplate he was wearing under his
uniform. He said his father had sent it to him
hoping it would save his life.

^ ' And it has saved it, ' ^ Goldstein said. ^ ^ Look
here.''

He struck a match and showed us a dent in
the breastplate close to his heart, and a little
above it he pointed out a scratch.

^^The dent's where a bullet struck," he said.
** Knocked me flat on my back, but that's all the
harm it did, thanks to my old man at home.
And that scratch I got from a Boche bayonet.
The Hun ran at me and jabbed me hard. Must
have thought I wasn't human when his bayonet
wouldn't go through. He's out there near the
wires now, what's left of him. I got him."

*^This workin' in the dark is wot suits me,"
said Bonesey. ^'I got three of the beggars, but
I'd 'ave 'ated to meet 'em by day. I never was
no good in the daytime. ' '

From somewhere in the dark I heard, ^ ^ Didn 't
I tell you there was going to be trouble?" I
knew that voice. It belonged to that funeral-
faced Welshie.

38 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

*^No need of tellin' us, old 'Ard Luck,'' sung
out Bonesey. ** There's always trouble comin'
when you're about."

*^Cheero!" said Billy Katchett. ^^It's all
over." And he sat down in the bottom of the
trench and sang:

"Are ice downhearted now?
Not likely while Britannia rules the waves!
While we've Jaclcy on the sea and Tommy on the land
We needn't fret.

It's a long, long way to Tipperary,
But we're not downhearted yet."

**Come and sing, Mascot," he said, '^and for-
get about trouble for a little."

I sat down beside him in the dark, and we sang
together ^^ The Ship That's Bound for Blighty,"
^*Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue," and ^'Take Me
Back to Dear Old Blighty," and for a time I
forgot about the bloody work we had had that
night.

Some of the lads came along and crouched
down beside us to listen. When we had finished
old Bonesey pulled me up and pounded me on
the back.

^^I'm thinkin' the Mascot made good," he
said. ^'The bloomin' little shaver got one —

THE GERMANS COME 39

right in the stomach. Ain't he the cute little
beggar nowT'

Bonesey always did have a good word to put
in for me. But I didn't need it that night. I
had killed my first German, and I was as puffed
up with pride over it as a lad who's just got
his V. C.

CHAPTER VI

THE LOST PATROL

BILLY CLEGG was a great lad for dreams.
Once lie dreamed that a German officer
was lying in the bottom of a shell hole near our
wires with a wounded leg. And, so help me,
it was the truth. The German was found there
the night after Billy told about it.

I was never much of a believer in dreams and
things like that myself, but the lads in the
trenches get to believe almost anything, so many
queer things happen there, and IVe more faith
in dreams than I once had. I've known them
to come true many a time. Two of Billy Clegg's
did — the one about the German and another
about himself.

*^ Mascot," he said to me one morning as he
crawled out of his dug-out, ^'I had a bad one
last night.''

'* About what?" said L

*^ About being out between the lines," an-
swered Billy. *'0w! It makes me shiver yet.

40

THE LOST PATROL 41

It was tliis way : They sent me out in the dark
with a patrol. That is, in my dream they did.
The first thing we knew we had walked right
into a party of Germans three times as big as
our own. They were all around us, and we
couldn't get away. And they came at us with
the bayonets.''

'^And what happened to you?" I asked.

**I don't know a blooming thing more about
what happened," said Billy. ''That's the end
of the dream."

And that same day they picked Billy Clegg as
one of a party to go out on patrol.

That night he and fifteen other lads went out.
I saw them go. Just before they climbed up
over the sand bags Billy came up to me and
shook me by the hand. A fine young fellow he
was, all smiles and jokes as a rule, but he looked
as solemn as an owl just then.

''Good-bye, Mascot," he said. "And if I
shouldn't come back write a letter home for
me."

Standing on the firing step, I put my head over
the top and watched them go out. I could see
them until they had passed through the lanes
between our wires and a little beyond ; then the

42 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

darkness swallowed them up. I wondered
whether I should ever see Billy Clegg again.

^^Of course he'll come back/' I told myself.
*'That dream has got on his nerves. But
there's no sense in dreams, and anyway he
didn 't dream he was killed. ' '

Then I turned in for some sleep.

It was daylight when I woke up, and the big
guns were booming, as they almost always were.

^^Did our patrol get back all right?" I asked
of a sergeant.

* ^ Still out, ' ' he answered. * ^ Something gone
wrong perhaps, or they may be lying safe out in
shell holes or in the wood over yonder."

The morning passed, and they hadn't re-
turned. But we didn't give up hope, because
patrols had been known to stay out two or three
days and come back safe. By the time it grew
dark our officers decided that something must
have happened to the patrol. There came a
call for volunteers to go out and search for
them.

In the party were Bonesey and I and eight
others. It was dangerous work, because the sky
was clear, there was no fog, and the moon was
due in less than an hour. It was dark enough

THE LOST PATROL 43

to hide us from the German trenches, but if the
moon should come up in a clear sky we should
have to come back in a hurry, and more than
likely the Boches would drop us on the way.

It was rough going, because almost every
square yard of the ground had been churned up
by shells. Sometimes we sank to our ankles,
and, as the earth was sticky, it was hard to pull
our feet out. Whenever the Germans sent up a
light we dropped flat on the ground and lay
there till it grew dark again.

We had been prowling about for perhaps fif-
teen minutes, when Bonesey dropped to the
ground and pulled me down beside him.

^^ Boches," he whispered.

The beggar's ears were as sharp as a bird
dog's.

^^I can't hear anything," I said.

' ' Whisht ! Listen ! ' ' whispered Bonesey.

The rest of the patrol had followed our ex-
ample, and were lying flat, too. We lay still
for a full minute. Then I heard voices. They
seemed to be drawing nearer. The men, who-
ever they were, were speaking very softly, but
now and then we could hear their footsteps and
the rattling of their guns.

44 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

*^ Perhaps they are our own men,'' I said.

^^ Don't be fooling of yourself, little boy," an-
swered Bonesey. ''Didn't I 'ear 'em talking?
And don 't I know their bloomin ' language when
I 'ears it?"

The next moment I saw them. They were
coming straight toward us. I counted them.
Twenty-two ! We were outnumbered more than
two to one. If they saw us we were as good as
done for. Oh, what beautiful marks they were !
We could have drawn a line on eight of them
and missed not one. That would have left
fourteen, and we might have got a few more
before they would begin shooting. But then
what would happen? As soon as they heard the
firing the Germans in the trenches would open
up on us with their star-lights and guns and
wipe us out. It's never safe to fire a gun in No
Man's Land.

The patrol came closer. I almost stopped
breathing, thinking every second that they
would see us. For a moment one of them stood
so near to me that I could have reached out and
almost touched him. I don't think I breathed
at all while he stood there. I thought he must
hear my heart pounding against my ribs, for it

THE LOST PATROL 45

was going like a trip-hammer. But he passed
on, and after a few moments I heard Bonesey
whisper :

*' They 're gone. Blind me eyes! IVe 'ad
close squeezes, Mascot, but never one like that.''
I jumped up and gasped for air. I was shak-
ing all over.

We waited, listening, a little while; then we
moved on. After a few minutes of prowling
about we decided we should have to go back,
or the moon would catch us. We had just
turned toward our own trench when we came
across a body. It was one of the men in the
missing patrol. There was a bayonet hole
through him. We searched over the ground
near where he lay and found six more of them,
all dead. The others we couldn't find, and we
were sure they must have been taken prisoners.
I saw one of our lads bending' over one of
the bodies. He looked up and turned to
me.

^^Give a hand. Mascot," he said, ^^and we'll
carry him in. It's Billy Clegg."

It was hard going and all we could do to get
across the rough ground with the bodies, but we
knew we had to move fast. Once I looked over

46 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

my shoulder, and what I saw gave me a scare.
Over the German trenches the sky was growing
bright.

Suddenly a glow of light fell over us. The
moon was up. The Germans would surely get
sight of us in a moment. Just then we came up
against the wires- — our own wires, and in an-
other minute we were safe.

The next day the postman brought a letter
and a package for Billy Clegg. The letter was
from his girl, for I knew her writing — a pretty
girl in Liverpool whom he had hoped to marry
some day. There was a package for me, too,
from my mother. Inside were some things to
eat and a mouth organ. I played the mouth
organ and Billy Matchett sang a song, while we
tried to forget about what had happened to
Billy Clegg.

But I couldn't forget that the poor lad had
asked me to write to his people at home. I'm a
bad hand at writing, but I got out a pencil and
paper and did the best I could. I got as far as,
*^You will be sorry to hear that Billy is dead,"
and there I stuck. I couldn't think of another
word to say that would do any good. After a
lot of thinking I made up my mind to add that

THE LOST PATROL 47

the Boches drove a bayonet through him, but
Bonesey told me not to.

*'You got to write only wot's cheerful and
consoling/' he said. *'Say, ' 'E died like a
'ero, fighting for hold England.' ''

So I did, and let it go at that.

**Now," said Bonesey, ^^I'm thinking that I
should be doing some writing myself. The close
squeeze I 'ad last night has set me thinking that
I may get killed before this war is over, and my
will's not made."

He pulled out his pay book, for there is a
blank place left in them for the lads to make
their wills, and began to write.

^^ Didn't know you had a family, Bonesey," I
said.

* * Not a soul belonging to me in this world, ' ' he
answered.

* ^ Then what 's the good of making a will ! ' '

^^ There might be a few shillings of back pay
comin' to me," he said, ^^and there's a few lit-
tle things I've left back in London."

''Who's going to get it!"

<<A girl. Mascot. She's the daughter of a lad
that was once a pal of mine. Shot by me side,
'e was, while we was doing a little job of 'ouse-

48 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

breaking one night. I Ve looked after 'er since
she wasn 't ranch more than knee 'igh to me, and
many's the night IVe taken chances with the
bobbies to get swag enough for 'er proper
schoolin^ She's full grown now and able to
look after 'erself, but she 'asn't forgotten old
Bonesey, not she.

*'When we marched off for the war about
every blighter in the company 'ad somebody
come to see 'im off and wish 'im well. And I
says to myself, *I'm the only bloke in the lot
that 's got nobody to say good-bye to. '

^^But, so 'elp me, the next minute I gets me
eyes on that little lassie, come hall the way from
London to give me a cheer. Blimey, if it didn 't
make me feel good !

^'She'll get the back shillings coming to me,
Mascot, and w 'atever else I Ve got, for she 's the
only bloomin' soul on earth wot will drop a tear
for Bonesey when 'e's planted under the dais-
ies.''

A shell ploughed into the sand bags, and the
shock almost sent the pad out of his hands ; but
he held onto it and began to write his will.

CHAPTER VII

GHOSTS OF THE NIGHT

NIGHT sentry-go is an ugly, creepy job.
My first try at it was the longest night
I've ever put in. Afterward it wasn't so bad.

^'So that mascot of ours is going to guard us
to-night," said Billy Matchett, who thought he
was a great joker because before he joined the
army he got his living in the music halls in that
way and with his singing. *'That means the
Boches will get us sure. The kid's scarce old
enough to keep awake in the daytime, let alone
at night. '^

Then he and big Tom Brannigan got busy
stretching the joke along till I felt like giv-
ing them a feel of my bayonet. Eed-headed
Murphy joined in with them, too, and he was
worse than either of them, for he never knew
when to stop, but I saw him killed on the road
to Arras a month later and I can forgive him
for all the fun he got out of me.

Sentry-go was two hours on and two hours off

49

50 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

all night. I hadn't slept well the night before,
for the ^^ cooties" and the rats had been after
me hard, but up there alone on the firing step
I felt so important that I forgot all about being
sleepy. I got to thinking of all the sleeping
soldiers I was guarding from danger and of
how the lives of all of them might hang on how
well I did the job in case the Huns should creep
up in the dark. And I said to myself :

^*It's quite a job for a sixteen-year-old lad,
Tommy Kehoe, and you should be proud of
yourself. There's many a friend of yours at
home in Liverpool that would like to be in your
shoes tonight.''

Sometimes it grew so quiet that I could hear
our men talking together in low voices in the
dug-outs. One voice was shrill and squeaky,
and I knew it belonged to *^ Windy" Bullen,
who was always talking about the '^cooties"
and rats he had killed. He was a proud lad
whenever he killed a ^* cootie" that was differ-
ent from the rest.

*^ Blimey now," I heard him squeaking, ^4f it
wasn't pink with green eyes, the bloody bloater !
And he chawed clean through me bloomin'
'ide!"

GHOSTS OF THE NIGHT 51

Then the artillery would begin again or a
machine gun would break loose. Every few
minutes a star-light would go up from the Ger-
mans' trenches, and, oh! it was a lovely sight
as it sent a soft glow over all the ugly shell
holes- It was like watching fireworks at home
on a holiday, only the air smelled better at home,
for there there weren't any dead bodies lying
about. Whenever a star-light went up I could
see some of those bodies.

When my legs grew stiff from standing still
looking over the sand bags I marched back and
forth along the firing step. A guard can do
that, but it's none too safe, for you never know
when the Germans will get busy. I had heard of
a night guard who was taking a little walk to
stretch his legs, when a Hun crept up and
knocked him on the head just as he made the
turn in his beat, and I couldn't help thinking that
the same thing might happen to me.

Two hours of it brought my lay-off, and I got
a little sleep till the Sergeant rapped me up with
a biff on the sole of my foot. Then back again
to the firing step. Nothing to do but stand
there looking over the sand bags wondering
whether a sniper would get me. More likely it

52 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

would be a macliine gun, for it was too black for
snipers. A sniper is a wonder when the moon
is up or the stars bright and the air clear, but
dark nights put him out of business, and I felt
lucky for that. Snipers or no, a guard has to
keep his helmet over the tojD more or less.

Except when the star-lights went up, I could
see just about as far as our wires. Just in front
of me something black was swinging against
them. It was a dead Hun with his head hang-
ing down. How long he had been there I don 't
know, but I got a strong whiff of him every
time the breeze came toward me and he couldn't
have been a new comer.

The worst thing about night sentry-go is the
trouble a lad has keeping awake. If you go to
sleep and the Sergeant catches you — ow ! They
could shoot a man for doing that, and no matter
how lucky he may be he never gets off easy.
But I couldn't help getting sleepy. I tried to
keep awake by walking, but as soon as I would
come back to my perch I would begin to nod
again. And then I dropped off.

I didn 't know anything more till I heard a low
whistle. That brought me wide awake with a
jump. I had been standing up, leaning against

GHOSTS OF THE NIGHT 53

my gun, but I may have been snoring for all I
knew. It gave me an awful scare. For a sec-
ond I didn't know whether the whistle had
come from the Sergeant or a German, but either
way would have been bad enough. I thought I
was done for. Then from somewhere down in
the trench came a whisper:

' ' Whisht ! Wake up, Mascot ! ' '

So it wasn't either the Sergeant or a Hun, and
I was safe. I kept wide awake after that.

There's something about night sentry-go that
stirs up a lad 's imagination till everything about
him is like a dream, and mostly like a bad dream,
too. The Irish boys from Liverpool are al-
ways seeing ghosts in the dark. Brannigan
used to see a headless soldier walking up and
down in front of the trench, and he would watch
the thing until cold shivers ran through him.
He saw the headless soldier coming for him in
a raid once, and it was the only time I ever saw
Big Tom afraid. He came near getting shot by
his officer for starting to run back to our trench.
And one day a little later, when a Hun whose
head had just been blown off tumbled right on
top of him in a shell hole he let out a yell that
we could hear above the artillery.

54 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

That first night on gnard I saw something
myself that I know now couldn't have been true
but that I couldn 't get out of my mind for days
and days afterward. As I was staring over
the top a rocket went up from the Germans and
sent a broad path of light from their trench
almost to ours. Eight in the centre of that
lighted way I saw somebody coming toward me.
It was a woman with her arms stretched out,
as if she were pleading. The light was shining
full on her face, and I saw it was my mother.

I thought I heard her calling,

*^ Tommy, lad! Tommy, lad!''

But the artillery was going just then and I
knew I couldn't have heard her voice at that
distance.

Then the light went out and she disappeared
in the dark.

I believed that night that I really had seen
her, and I wondered whether she was groping
about for me out there in the dark. Then I
began to be afraid. I thought my mother might
be dead and that this was her ghost come to
find me. It was terrible to think of her moving
about out there among all those dead men ; but
it seemed just as bad to have her creeping to-

GHOSTS OF THE NIGHT 55

ward me out of the dark. Ghosts are ghosts,
and I didn't care to meet with one alone in the
night, even my mother's.

A week later I got a letter from her that told
me she was as well as ever.

It wasn't death or the dead soldiers that
frightened the Tommies ; it was those dead sol-
diers' ghosts.

I remember that after Charlie Tapper was
killed his pal, McGuire, couldn't sleep nights for
fear Charlie would come back and haunt him.
And one night Charlie's ghost did come.

McGuire was in his dug-out writing a letter
home. He felt a puff of cold air on his face,
and, looking up, he saw Charlie, who didn't seem
to be made of anything much but white fog, com-
ing in through the door.

*^Mac," says the ghost, '^I can't rest easy till
I get a plug of tobacco. Could you spare your
old matey a cut of it?"

Mac spilled the ink all over the paper and
buried his head in a blanket. When at last he
got up nerve enough to peek out Charlie was
gone, and Mac never forgave himself for not
passing over the plug.

Thinking over those things up there against

56 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

the parapet made me nervous. I thought I saw
the dead German who was hanging on the fence
move his arms, and it made me jump. Then a
rocket went up and I got a look at his face, and
even though he was hanging head down he
looked as if he might be asleep, dreaming of his
home.

^'Well, Fritzie,'' I told him, ^'I shouldn't
wonder if that's how it will come to all of us —
with a dream of home."

Then I thought of my own home, and imagined
I could see my mother looking out of the win-
dow to the pier's head where the ships come in
and wondering when I was coming back.

* ' Tommy, lad, ' ' I said to myself, * * if ever I get
back there again that's where I'll stay. It's too
full of dead men's ghosts out here."

CHAPTER VIII

HEEOES AND COWARDS

YOU may think a man a coward when he^s
not ; you may think another is brave when
he^s not. IVe found that it's only in the
trenches that you find out much about a man
that's more than skin deep.

^'There's many a lad that's no good that
looks good and seems good," our chaplain, Fa-
ther O'Brien, told me. ^^And there's many a
lad who's all white inside without you ever
thinking it. A man's got to do more than say
his prayers to prove he's a Christian."

One night a party went out on patrol, and
one of them was ^* Windy" Dick, who had
fainted when he heard the artillery as we
marched to Ypres.

^* Better say your prayers, "Windy," some-
body called to him. ^'That's a bad job you're
on. The Boches will get you like as not."

^^ Windy" didn't make any answer to that.

57

58 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

The lads had been making fun of him ever since
the day he dropped in the road, and he had
learned that it only made them worse to talk
back. He went np over the top with the rest of
the party, and that was the last we saw of
him till after dark the next evening. The pa-
trol had got back long before that without him,
and it was an even bet whether ^' Windy'' had
been shot or scared to death.

We had about made up our minds we were
never going to see him again when three men
hove in sight out of the dark beyond the wires.
One was driving the other two along at the end
of his bayonet and was ripping out a curse at
them with every step.

*^ Blimey if it isn't Windy Dick!" cried Bone-
sey. "Has me eyesight gone wrong, or am I
dreaming I"

That was who it was, too ; "Windy" with two
prisoners, and his chest was sticking out like a
pigeon's with pride.

"I've been lying out in a shell hole all day
with these two blokes waiting for dark before
bringing them in," he said. "They've been
whining 'kamerad' at me three times a minute
for fifteen hours thereabouts and I''ve been

HEROES AND COWARDS 59

tickling them with the bayonet every time they
said it. ' '

**You're not meaning to tell us you got that
pair all by your little self f said Big Tom.

^'I did,'' answered ''Windy," ''which is more
than you've done. And don't you be calling me
'Windy' any more, either."

The lads thought "Windy" must have gone
balmy. Not only had he taken two prisoners
all by himself, but he was a changed man.
There wasn't anything meek and timid about
the way he carried himself now.

The next day he told me what had happened.
Somehow in the dark he had got separated from
the patrol, and while wandering about alone try-
ing to find them he had caught sight of the two
Huns.

He had been so scared when he went out with
the patrol that he made up his mind he was
going to be killed sure, and when he saw the
Huns he thought his time had come to go west.
That idea put some ginger into him, and he said
to himself that if he'd got to die he might as
well pass out fighting. So he sailed into the
Huns, who didn't see him coming and who were
so taken by surprise when they saw his bayonet

60 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

under their noses that they threw up their
hands.

^^ Windy'' wandered about with the two
Boches till sunrise, for he had lost his bearings
and was afraid of getting into the German
trench by mistake. When it grew light he made
sure which way to go, and dropped with the
Boches into the shell hole to wait for dark when
walking wouldn 't be sure death.

After that there wasn't a better fighter in the
company than ^' Windy" Dick, w^ho had been
scared into being brave.

One of the bravest men of the war was in our
regiment. He was James Proctor, of Liver-
pool. He brought in twenty-four wounded men
one at a time on his shoulders from in front
of the German guns, and won the Victoria
Cross.

I wasn't there when that was done, but the
lads were all talking about it, and one of them,
Michael 0 'Grady, of A Company, said he was
going to win the Victoria Cross, too, or die
trying for it.

**I'm going over to the Boches trench to drop
a bomb," he told Sergeant Griffiths.

It was a bright night, with the snipers busy,-

HEROES AND COWARDS 61

and the Sergeant warned him that he would be
killed.

^ ' I don 't care, ' * answered 0 ^Grady. * ^ I want
to earn something.''

He crept up over the top and began crawling
toward the Germans. The Sergeant thought
he would be killed before he had gone ten yards,
but, although the bullets began to fly, none of
them struck him. He had crawled to within a
few feet of the Germans ' first line when he was
killed.

Another brave man was ^^Eed'' Bullen, who
was brave because he had got the notion into his
head that he couldn't be killed.

^ 'I've been through more tight places than any
man in the company, " * ' Red ' ' would say, * ' with-
out a scratch to show for it. If I 'd been slated
to die I'd have been buried long ago. Look at
this. It's what saves me. I can't be killed so
long as I've got this about me."

Then he would pull out a little cross a French
girl had given him and that he wore hanging
from a string around his neck. She had told
him it would save him from being shot as long
as he wore it.

One day he and three other men were to-

62 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

getlier behind the lines when a shell exploded
where they were standing. ^'Eed'^ was
knocked down, but he jumped up and found that
he was unhurt except for some gravel in his
eyes. Then he saw that the three men who had
been standing beside him had all been killed.
After that he was more certain than ever that
the cross would save him.

No matter how fast the bullets came, *^Red''
didn't care.

^^They can't get me," he would say. ^^I
needn't worry."

And then one day a bullet did get him.

^'He must have lost his cross," said Big Tom,
who was superstitious and believed in things
like that.

And, so help me ! he had lost it. It wasn't on
his body, and the string around his neck was
broken.

*^ Don't tell me there's nothing in luck
pieces," said Big Tom. ^^And yet I've known
'em to fail. A man I knew in B Company had
a bead a girl had given him, and he always
wore it next his skin, thinking it would save him.
But he was killed the first day he was in the
front line. How can you account for that now?

HEROES AND COWAEDS 63

The way I figure it is that some of these luck
pieces are lucky and some are unlucky, and
there ^s never any telling which is which.
You Ve just got to wear 'em and take a chance.'*

But I never could see it that way myself. If
a lad has to take a chance with them he might
as well take a chance without them. I never
wore one, and here I am alive.

Speaking of brave men, there were none
braver than the Ghurkas, who fought side by
side with us in those Ypres trenches. They
had brought with them from India their big
knives, curved like mowing sickles and sharp-
ened on the concave edge, and they used them
more often than the bayonet. They would
swing them around and chop off the Huns ' heads
just as if they were mowing grass. Then on
the points of the knives they would carry the
heads back to their own trenches. Of all the
men in our line the Germans dreaded those black
Ghurkas the most.

Sometimes we would steal the Ghurkas'
shirts, but they were a good-natured lot so long
as we didn't go too far with our jokes. But if
anybody went past the limit with them he was
sure to be in trouble, for the Ghurka is a bad

64 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

man to have dealings with when he's angry.

Whenever they set out for the German
trenches the Ghurkas never stopped, no matter
how thick the bullets were flying. And, oh ! how
Fritzie hated to see them coming! With those
big knives of theirs they could clean out a Ger-
man trench quicker than any men I ever saw.
But they were no account if the officers wanted
prisoners, for they were too fond of chopping
the Huns ' heads off to take any of them alive.

We had many lads of our own as brave as any
Ghurka that ever lived, but we had cowards, too,
and that's more than the Ghurkas had. I
learned a thing or two from those men who w^ere
afraid. I found that they w^ere just as likely
to get killed as the men who were brave. And
I said to myself,

^'What's the use of being a coward when it
doesn't even save your life?"

Most of them were born cowards, and they
never got over it, no matter how much fighting
they went through. One of them came up to
me one day and held up his trigger finger.

^^ Shoot it oif for me, will you. Mascot?" he
said. ^^I want to go back to Blighty."

I wouldn't do it, but he kept on asking till he

HEROES AND COWARDS 65

found somebody who did the job for him. I
could count a dozen such men who tried to lose
the trigger finger to get out of the war. And
I knew another who wanted to lose a finger but
who didn 't have the nerve. Every day he would
talk about it, but when somebody would offer to
shoot it off he would change his mind. That
poor chap was always afraid, and even after he
had been weeks in the trenches he would jump
every time a shell came near.

Then came a night when he had to go over
the top in a raid. He was shaking so much he
could scarcely climb out of the trench. Half
way across No Man's Land he got a bullet in the
back, and it was said afterward that it was
one of our own officers who shot him because he
was running away.

Better to be a brave man than a coward, and
just as safe — perhaps a little safer. That's the
lesson I learned from such men as he.

CHAPTER IX

^'hakd luck'' prophesies again

BLIND me eyes! If 'ere isn't old 'Ard
Luck back again! Wot's goin' to 'ap-
pen to us now!"

It was old Bonesey, giving a welcome to the
funeral-faced lad from the Fusiliers. We
hadn't seen Welshie for some time, but he hadn't
changed. He was the same old cheer-killer.

^^Now, I'm telling you, there's trouble on the
way," Welshie began as soon as he had joined
us.

^^ There's always trouble, with you about,"
growled Bonesey. ^ ' Wot 's the gay word you 've
brought now 1 ' '

^*Just set your eyes on that sky," said
Welshie. ^^I'm telling you we're in for bad
weather, and you'll know what that means after
we've had a few days of it. It rains something
awful in this God-forgotten land when it does
rain, and I'm telling you it's on the way.

66

^^HARD LUCK'' PROPHESIES 67

There '11 be good swimming in these trenches be-
fore it's over."

Welshie should have been in the government
weather office. People would always know when
storms were coming then. Only there 'd be
nothing else but storms.

It came just as that cheerful lad had pre-
dicted. That evening it began to rain. It
rained all night hard. The water came into our
dug-outs and soaked us through and through.
No chance of dry clothes to change to. When
we got wet we stayed wet. While we slept we
oozed with water and mud. The rats splashed
about beside us, spattering us and now and then
running over us. A dry rat feels bad enough
on a lad's face, but a wet one — ow ! I squirmed
all the rest of the night after feeling one.

In the morning we got some tea, dog-biscuits
and bully beef, but we couldn't get the mud out
of our mess-tins, and it got mixed up with the
food. There was only one thing to console us :
the guns weren't so busy as usual. Sometimes
an hour would pass without a sound but the rain
and the curses of the soldiers. Now and then
the artillery would loosen up a little, and the
shells sent the mud spouting up in big, brown

68 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

geysers. A shell struck only a few feet away
from us, and the mud storm that went up from
the hole it made came down all over us. I
thought before that happened that we were as
muddy as we could be, but we were a lot worse
afterward.

^^I say. Mascot,'' Billy Matchett called to me
as he tried to wipe the mud out of his eyes.
''What did you ever get into this blinkin' war
for? You didn't have to."

''To get a bit of adventure, Billy," I an-
swered. "And I'm getting it — more than I
wanted. Those old pirates I used to read about
were better off than we. They didn't have mud
like this where they were, or if they did the book
writers forgot to mention it."

"When this war is over," said Billy, "I'll
look for my adventures do^vn on the tropic is-
lands, if I need any more. I've had enough of
this country."

The trenches were filling up fast. The pumps
worked steadily, but the water came in faster
than they could send it out. By the end of that
day it was up to my waist. And, oh, it was
cold! I almost froze. It wouldn't have been
so bad if I had known I was going to have a

^^HARD LUCK" PROPHESIES 69

dry place to creep into at niglit to sleep, but
there was no hope of that. We knew we should
have to stay where we were, shivering and with
our teeth chattering, until the rain stopped and
the sun came out, and there was no telling when
that would be.

*^The water's spoiled all my fags,'' moaned
Billy. * ^ I 'd give all the back pay coming to me
for a smoke."

Most of the lads were in the same fix, and not
having any cigarettes made them sadder than
ever, for a Tommy doesn't think life is worth
living when he can't smoke. There was no
singing in the trench that day; even Billy had
lost his voice, and it wasn't often he was without
a song to cheer us with.

Nothing but growls and curses, and the swish,
swish, swish of the rain. Up on the firing step
the sentries, with the water running from their
helmets, were staring over the top, but they
couldn't see anything but the rain. There
didn't seem to be much need of their being there,
for the Germans weren't going to attack in such
weather. The fight must have been taken all
out of those Huns, as it was out of us.

And yet one of them did come — just one —

70 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

through all that rain and mud. But he hadn't
come to fight. He came wallowing through the
mud and water like a half -drowned rat, with his
hands above his head, and crying, ^^Kamerad!
Kamerad!''

The sentries let him pass, and as he jumped
into the trench the splash he sent up half blinded
us.

* ^How did you get here 1 ' ' asked the Sergeant,
when Fritzie had come to the surface and had
blown the water out of his mouth.

^^Ach! Mein Gott!" cried Fritzie. ''1
svinuned here.''

Then he told how when nobody was looking
he had climbed out of his own trench, Avhich
he said was in even worse shape than ours, and
had crawled over the sand bags into the mud.
In all the rain the German sentries didn't notice
him, but for the first few yards he was afraid
to stand up and crawled through the mud, where
sometimes he sank so deep that he thought he
was lost. Once he fell into a shell hole, and
sank in mud and water to his neck. He thought
he would never get out of that hole, but he man-
aged it at last.

Then he lost his way, and splashed about for

'^HARD LUCK'' PROPHESIES 71

hours. At last he came up against our wires,
but he didn't know whether they were ours or
the Germans '. He lay there listening, and after
a time heard somebody calling in English.

He told us he had had enough of fighting and
had been trying to get away for weeks. He had
been told that the English tortured their prison-
ers, but long before the war he had been a waiter
in a London hotel and had learned so much
about the English then that he didn't believe
what he had heard about us in the trenches.

That night the dug-outs were too full of wa-
ter to sleep in, and we stayed in the trenches.
Oh, what a night ! Rain, rain, rain ! It never
stopped. And all night long the cold, muddy
water half covered us. Some of the men
dropped asleep standing up. Sometimes one
of them would lose his balance, fall over into
the water with a big splash and disappear.
Then he would come floundering up from the
bottom with the sleep all washed out of him,
and mad as a hatter. That happened to Billy
Matchett once, and when I saw him coming up
from under the water blowing and puffing I
thought of the worrying he had done on our
first day at the front about how he was going to

72 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

get his regular daily bath, for he had been a
natty chap back in Liverpool. We had just
gone into the first-line trench, when he asked of
a Black Watcher:

^ ^ Tell me, old top : how do we get our morn-
ing tubr^

^^You gets it when it rains,'' said the Black
W^atcher. *^And then you gets it good.''

For an hour or two after he heard that, Billy
lost all interest in trench life. He had been
talking about baths and dreaming about them
ever since. And now that he was getting a good
one he was no more satisfied than he had been
before.

We thought the lads out on ^^ night ops" be-
tween the lines were lucky for once, for they
didn't have to spend the night in water and could
move about and get warm. But when they
came back, just before daylight, we found they
hadn't been so lucky after all. We were a hard-
looking lot ourselves by that time, and they
looked even worse than we.

They had been on the go all night in mud so
deep and sticky that every step was hard work.
Sometimes they had sunk in it to their knees.
They were covered all over with it, and we

**HARD LUCK'^ PROPHESIES 73

couldn^t recognize our best friends among them.

They told ns they had spent the worst night
of their lives, and that there wasn't one of them
who hadn't fallen into a shell hole where he
went out of sight in the mud. Once they had
been so close to the enemy trench that they
heard what the Boches were saying, and they
had stayed to listen to some of Fritzie's sad
songs. The Boches will sing no matter how un-
happy they may be, but when things go wrong
their songs are about as cheerful as a funeral
march.

About noon that day the rain stopped, and
before long the sun came out. But that didn't
help matters much, because the water and mud
in the trench were as bad as ever. At last the
pumps got the water out, but a good part of the
sun-baked mud stuck to us as long as we were
up in front.

CHAPTER X

A BIG push was coming. We all knew it,
though how is more than I can say. For
days the word had been going about that we
were going to get after Fritzie hard and send
him back a little nearer to where he came from.

^'It^s about time,'^ growled Big Tom, *^that
this blinkin' lot of blighters got another name
than the ^Scruffy Fifth, ^ and here's our chance
to get it if we're going after them bloomin'
Boches at last. ' '

The ^^ Scruffy Fifth" we were called because
we were so grimy and buggy, but it wasn't
through any fault of ours. How could we be any-
thing else but scruffy when we hadn 't been able
to wash our faces since we got to the trenches?
I'd have bet my pay that a lot of others who
gave us that name were no cleaner than we. I
never could understand why they picked us out
for that title, when the whole army should have

74

^^GIVE 'EM THE BAYONET!'' 75

had it if anybody. But we had got it, and there
wasn't a lad among us who didn't make up
his mind, when he heard the big push was com-
ing, that the ' * Scruffy Fifth ' ' would win a bet-
ter name, if we all had to die for it.

One evening the word was passed around that
we were going over the top some time before
morning, and before long we were told that the
time was set for midnight sharp.

I had heard enough from the old-timers to
know what that meant. It meant that a lot of
us would be killed, and a lot more wounded. I
couldn't help feeling nervous and jumpy. A
good deal worse I should have felt, too, if I
hadn't killed that big Hun in the raid, but that
put heart into me and made me sure that, even
though I was only a ninety-six pounder, I was
going to have an even chance with those six-foot-
ers from Prussia.

^^Go for their stomachs. Tommy," I kept say-
ing to myself. ^ ' Go for their stomachs. Dodge
under their bayonets, and get 'em from below."

We spent a lot of time cleaning our guns and
making sure our bayonets were in good shape,
and the bombers filled their haversacks with
enough stuff to blow up the whole German line.

76 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

Twenty minutes before midnight every man
of us was ready and waiting. Those minutes
of waiting were the hardest part of all that
night's work, for it was only then that we had
any time to think, and worry, and wonder what
was going to happen to us. And that little bit
of time dragged along as if it were hours. I
never knew the men to be so quiet; no talking,
no laughing, no singing. If we had been old
timers it wouldn 't have mattered, and we should
have been as cheerful as ever, but a lad does
a lot of hard thinking just before his first time
over the top.

Twelve o'clock came. Up we went and over.

It was a black night, but dozens of rockets
were going up, and the way lay clear before us.
Our wire cutters had cut wide lanes in our fences
for us, and we crowded through them. The
artillery and the machine guns were going like
mad. The bullets were singing all around us.

Some of our men fell. One toppled over
right in front of me, so close that I had to run
over him. If he w^as dead it didn't matter and
if wounded I doubt if my ninety-six pounds hurt
him much.

A shell whizzed along just above us. I felt

^'GIVE ^EM THE BAYONET!" 77

the wind from it. It was so close that it lifted
the caps from some of the men's heads.

Once I stumbled and fell. For a moment I
lay there feeling myself all over, wondering if
I had been hit. When I had made sure I was
all right I jumped up and ran on. By that time
the men were well ahead of me. As I tried to
catch up a shell burst among them and I saw
some bodies flying into the air.

Then the way began to be filled with dead and
wounded. Some of the wounded were dragging
themselves over the ground, trying to get into
shell holes or back to our trenches. I passed a
man who was kneeling by the side of a dying lad
whose legs had been blown off. The man on
his knees was our chaplain. I heard him pray-
ing as I went by. A brave man was Father
O'Brien — brave and good, and careless of his
own life when there were wounded lads who
needed him. He had gone over the top with the
first of us, though I have known of many a chap-
lain who would never do that and who would
wait for the wounded to be brought to him be-
hind the lines.

Over to the right a big tank, the first I had
ever seen in action, was bobbing along toward

78 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

the German line. It broke through the wires
as if they had been no more than cobwebs, and
came to a stop right over the Germans' first
trench, with all its guns spouting.

I was almost there now, and I saw our lads
piling in on top of the Huns. Ow ! How they
did pile in on them ! Even the artillery couldn 't
drown the chorus of yells and groans that came
up from that tangle of fighters. It was like a
whole menagerie of starved wildcats let loose.
I didn't think of anything then but of jumping
into the fight. There wasn't time to be afraid.

As I reached the trench I came up in front of
a big Hun, who was standing on the parapet with
his gun raised over his head and his bayonet
pointing down at me.

I ducked my head and went for him. I 'd have
been a goner if I hadn 't. It was my only chance.
His bayonet must have slid over me just as my
own got him in the stomach. He threw up his
arms, his gun came tumbling over me, and he
went dowTi on his knees, while his body slowly
crumpled up into a heap.

It's queer what thoughts sometimes come into
a chap's mind at such moments. As I jabbed
him the words of that Welsh Fusilier ran

One of our lads brought the butt of a gun down on his head

THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX
TILDEiN FOUNDATIONS

'^GIVE 'EM THE BAYONET!'' 79

througli my head: * ^You'll know the Lord is
glad every time you stick your bayonet into a
Hun." And I did know it. I knew the Lord
was fighting on our side, as Father 0 'Brien had
told us, and that I was doing His work.

A good many of our men had jumped clear
over that first trench and had gone on to the
next, but when I made the leap I landed in the
bottom in a heap. It isn't easy to make a long
jump with a rifle in your hands unless you're
long in the legs, and I'm not.

When I got to my feet I saw a German coming
for me. I jumped back a foot or two just as he
made a lunge for me with his bayonet, and he
missed me by an inch. He was going at me
again, when one of our lads brought the butt of
a gun down on his head and knocked him cold.

About twenty feet away there were some more
Germans, but before I had to worry about them
a bomber did the trick for the whole lot. There
were six of them. The bomb killed three and
tore the others up so badly that they couldn't
have lived very long.

By that time the first trench was fairly well
cleaned out. The only Germans left in it were
dead or wounded except the prisoners, and there

80 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

were a lot of tliem. Fritzie will fight hard un-
til he sees the game is up, and then he doesn't
lose any time in throwing up his hands and cry-
ing, ^^Kamerad!''

It was while I was watching those prisoners
that I learned what a tricky, savage beast
Fritzie can be. There- was one among them who
managed to get his hand into his coat, and from
it he pulled out a bomb. He was about to throw
it into a group of our men when somebody ran
him through with a bayonet. The bomb
dropped to the ground. It didn't explode, and
the man who had killed him picked it up and
threw it over the top. It burst with an a^vful
crash a few yards away, but no one was hurt.

After that I climbed up to see what had be-
come of the lads who had gone on to the second
trench. There was a lot of fighting going on
over there, and I decided to make a run for it
and take a hand in the fuss, for my fighting
blood was up by that time and I wasn't thinking
of danger.

I went, and luck was with me, for, though the
artillery and the ^' typewriters" were showering
all the ground that lay between, I wasn't
touched. Perhaps it was because I was so much

'^GIVE 'EM THE BAYONET !'' 81

smaller than the rest and harder to hit. I have
often thought there was something in that no-
tion, for it always seemed to me there were more
big men killed than little ones.

I was almost across to the second trench, when
I saw a lad from our company crawling toward
me, wounded. I stopped, thinking I should
help him.

^ * Go on, kid, and fight, ' ' he cried. ^ ^ It 's only
a broken leg.''

So I left him and ran on.

It was the liveliest kind of a fight that I
jumped into. Our lads and the Huns were all
mixed up together, clubbing, bayoneting and
shooting, while our bombers were cleaning out
the dug-outs fast.

I killed another Hun in that trench. It was
easy, for I caught him on my bayonet while he
was going at somebody else, and he didn't see
me coming. That made two for me — fairly
good for a lad of my size, I thought — but I
didn't get a chance at another, though we cap-
tured a third trench before the fighting was
over.

By the time we got that third trench we liked
the fighting so much that we didn't want to stop,

82 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and we might have gone on to Berlin if our
officers had let us. That was the place I wanted
to get to, and I thought I should see it some
day. I wanted a chance to shake my fist in the
Kaiser's face, the bloody blighter! and perhaps
to run a prince along at the end of my bayonet.

But the fighting was over for that day, though
there was much work to be done, running the
prisoners back to the rear, patching up the
trenches we had won and putting up parapets,
and we were a tired lot when night came. We
got some sleep then.

But out on the shell-pitted ground we had
crossed there was no sleep for the stretcher
bearers. Four hundred and fifty of our dead
and wounded lay out there in the dark, and many
a fine lad I had known among them.

Yes, the finest of all was among them — our
chaplain, dead beside a dying rifleman. They
found him on his knees, and they thought at
first that he was praying. The tears came to
my eyes when I heard that he was gone, for he
had been a good friend to me, and there wasn't
a man among us who didn't love him. Many a
time after that I thought of him, and sometimes
when I was feeling homesick, or when the rains

/

^^GIVE 'EM THE BAYONET !'' 83

and the mud and the hard marching were taking
the heart out of me it seemed to me I heard his
voice speaking to me, telling me to be brave and
have faith in Grod.

CHAPTEE XI

IT^S THE FIGHTING FIFTH

GOOD-BYE, old ' ' Scruffy Fifth ! ' ' It 's the
"Fighting Fifth'' now. Ask any British
soldier who was at Ypres in the summer of 1917
what they called the Liverpool Fifth Battalion.
Ask a London Scottie or a Welsh Fusilier ; ask
the Bantams or the Ghurkas, for they were all
there, and any one of them will answer, "The
^Fighting Fifth' is their name, and they've
earned it."

From the night we took the three German
trenches at the loss of so many of our men we
began to hear that new name, and it wasn't
many days before we were known by it every-
where. And I can tell you I was proud of it.
I belonged to the "Fighting Fifth," and the old
fighters in the lines would have to forget that
they had called me "the Scruffies' mascot."
We all went about with our chests sticking out as
if every one of us had won the V. C, and we

84

IT'S THE FIGHTING FIFTH 85

no longer envied even the Black Watch, famous
though they were and heroes of many battles.

**It's about time, I'm thinking," said Big
Tom, *Hhat since we're the Scruffies no more
they should send us back where we can get a
little water to wash our faces with, to say noth-
ing of washing all over."

We had been in the front trenches a month,
and I know my own face hadn 't been washed in
all that time, except in the muddy water that we
wallowed in when it rained, for clean water was
too scarce to use for washing. But at last we
were told that we were going back to rest bil-
lets, and that every one of us was going to have
a bath. It made us all happy except Bonesey.

*^ Blimey!" he grumbled. *^I don't know as
I take to this hidea of a bath, it 's so long since
I've 'ad one. It'll give me a cold or worse.
Wot's the use of washin' us? We're all right
as we are, and most of us blokes weren't the
bathin' kind at any time. There's that old
blighter in A Company that was a tramp before
the war and that would rather sit up on the
sand bags for the snipers to shoot at than get
scrubbed. 'E'll desert to the Germans if this
bloomin ' bath is forced on 'im. ' ^

86 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

But Billy Matchett almost fainted with joy
when he heard the news. Back in Liverpool
he had never gone without his morning tub, and
he had been ashamed to keep company with him-
self ever since he got to the front.

We needed that rest, for we had lost a lot
of sleep in the trenches and had fought and
worked hard. There had been two days when
we got along on nothing but tea and biscuit,
for something — I never learned just what the
trouble was — had gone wrong with the food
supply, and at the best of times the food hadn^t
been anything to brag about. We had shivered
in the wet for days together. We had put up
with ^'cooties'' and rats, and the German artil-
lery had been hammering at us day and night.
AVe were fed up with front-trench life when at
last the order came that sent us back to the
rear.

A grimier lot of lads never came out of a coal
mine than we were when we went marching back
to our base, five miles away. Our clothes were
ragged, most of the men hadn't shaved in more
than a month, and almost all of them had a tired,
half-\vild look in their eyes. No wonder the
girls we passed wouldn't give us so much as a

IT^S THE FIGHTING FIFTH 87

smile and tliat the children ran away from us.
But we didn^t care. We were the ^^ Fighting
Fifth.''

Back at the base we got all cleaned up in no
time, even Bonesey — baths, new clothes, shaves,
though I didn't have to trouble about the shav-
ing part of it, not being old enough to grow
whiskers. I wished those girls we had passed
could have seen us then. We would have shown
them what a fine-looking lot the ^* Fighting
Fifth" could be.

It was an easy, cushy life back at the base
— nothing to do but lie about most of the time
and talk and play ^^ house" and ^^brag."
Those are the two card games the soldiers play.

Poor old Bonesey did love the cards, and we
hadn't been back at the base two days when he
had lost his pay playing ^' house," besides a
German helmet and a lot of other relics he had
brought from the front. Even his '^fags" he
lost, and he had to borrow smokes to keep him
going to the next pay day.

For hours at a time we lay out in the sun
talking over all we had been through and what
each of us had done in the big raid on the Ger-
mans. Bonesey had killed ten men, so he said.

88 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

but I think he must have counted wrong, for
some of the lads who had been fighting close to
him said he killed only one and wounded an-
other. But Big Tom had killed six, and had
witnesses to prove it. I don't know how many
Billy got. He was a brave lad, but wasn 't given
to bragging.

We had a theatre back at the base, and Billy
was one of the singers. Some famous singers
and players came over from England to enter-
tain us. Harry Lauder was one of them, and
the lads gave him a great welcome. Life in
those dirty old front trenches seemed like a bad
dream while we were having all those good
times.

When it rained we crept into dug-outs or
shacks or houses, but in fair weather we Avere
out under the sky day and night. At night,
lying in our blankets on the ground, we watched
the shells and rockets shooting up into the sky,
and were glad we were out of all that danger
for a while. We could lie there, clean and quiet
and peaceful, and watch the stars twinkle while
we thought about our people at home and of
how good it would be to get back there.

All kinds of people we met at those rest bil-

IT^S THE FIGHTING FIFTH 89

lets — Belgian women and children who had been
driven from their homes by the Germans, old
Frenchmen who had been in the Franco-Prus-
sian war, and men in our own army who had
served for many years and had fought in many
lands.

There was Sergeant Doyle, of our own regi-
ment, who had fought in India and with Kitch-
ener in the Soudan, and who had many a tale
to tell of what he had been through. A very
different kind of fighting it had been to what
we knew in Belgium; fighting with never a
trench nor dug-out, tank nor gas ; fighting with
the army on the move all the time and with the
cavalry playing as big a part as the infantry.
It all seemed as strange to us lads as the old
days of the knights in armour, yet Sergeant
Doyle was the younger side of fifty and it
couldn't have been so very many years ago. I
suppose that when I am a grey-headed gaifer
the way we fought in Belgium will seem as
strange to the young soldiers as the way Ser-
geant Doyle fought in the Soudan did to us.

And there was Fogarty, who had fought
against the Mad Mullah in Somaliland and
against the savages in South Africa, and who

90 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

had wounds to show for it. Once he and a few
other men had been surrounded on the desert
by more than two hundred of the Mad Mullah's
soldiers.

^'We dropped into a hollow,'' Fogarty told
us, as we lay out in a field one night under the
stars, **and though there were only twelve of
us, we made it so hot for those Arabs that they
didn't dare come near. But they were on all
sides of us, and we couldn't get away. All day
we lay there, and the heat was fit to kill. Then
the night came do^vn, but there wasn't a chance
to sneak off in the dark, for the lines were
drawTi too close around us. We might hold
them off, for they weren't too eager to lose a
lot of men by rushing us, but it was the fear
of thirst that worried us the most. Our wa-
ter bottles were almost empty, and we didn't
dare take another drink. Our throats were so
dry we couldn't speak above a whisper. And
then morning came, and the sun came up, scorch-
ing hot, and the thirst drove us almost mad.
Some of the men could stand it no longer, and
drained their bottles dry, but the rest of us
kept what few drops we had and only moistened
our lips, not knowing how long we might be

IT'S THE FIGHTING FIFTH 91

there. Before that day was over two of the
men who had drained their bottles went crazy,
and were for going out and fighting their w^ay
through the Arabs alone. We had to hold them
back, and they fought us with their fists till the
strength was all gone out of them. We knew
we couldn 't stand another day of it, and how we
kept our senses through the night I don't know.
The next day broke, and we thought it was our
last. And then, just as the sun came up over
the sand, we caught sight of a column of British
soldiers coming toward us, and we knew we were
saved. ' '

Another night a Frenchman with one arm — he
was out of the war for good then — told us how
he had fought in the Battle of the Marne and
of the vision that his regiment had seen. Not
one of us knew more than a few words of
French, but he could speak English as well as
anybody, for he had lived for years in Lon-
don.

* * It was at the end of that great day when we
turned the Boches back from their drive on
Paris," he told us. *'The greatest day of the
war it was, for the city was only a few miles
away, and the whole world thought the Kaiser

92 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

was going to get it. But we drove Ms big army
back, weak though we were. That evening there
came a blaze of light over in the northern sky,
and above it, among the clouds, we saw Joan of
Arc on a white horse leading her army. You
may doubt it, but I tell you I saw it with my own
eyes, and so did thousands of others, and to-
day the story is told all over France. There
can have been no doubt of what we saw ; it was
seen by too many to leave any question. If only
I myself had seen it I might have thought I had
been dreaming, but the whole regiment told the
same story, and I saw many men fall down
on their knees as they stared at it, while others
cheered as if they took it as a sign from Heaven
that France would be saved."

The Tommies blew out a lot of cigarette
smoke as he finished that story, and they said
not a word. It was a queer one, I'll admit, and
hard to swallow, but I heard it later in France
from many a soldier who had fought at the
Mame.

CHAPTEE XII

THE MAD WOMAN OF YPRES

WE tliought we had learned in the trenches
what a bad lot the Bodies were, but
after we had been back at the base a few days
we knew far worse things abont them. Many
a story w^e heard of the black things they had
done that made us feel like going out and try-
ing to wipe out the whole bloody army of them,
if we had to die for it.

It had been a fine country around Ypres, full
of lovely gardens and splendid houses, before
the Huns got there, but the gardens were ruined
now, and so were the big homes they belonged
to.

One day Billy, Bonesey and I were out for a
stroll, when we came to a big chateau. At the
foot of the road that led up to it stood a lodge
which had been battered by shells and was fall-
ing to pieces. Inside the gate in what was left
of a great flower garden were rows and rows of
little wooden crosses that marked the graves

93

94 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

of soldiers. The chateau, like the lodge, was
half ruined. Every window in it was broken,
and shells had torn great holes through the
roof.

We went inside, and there we saw what a
wreck the Huns had made of all the expensive
furnishings. They had slashed the tapestries
on the walls, chopped chairs and tables to pieces,
broken mirrors, and used their knives on the
woodwork without any other reason than love
of mutilating things. Even the fine piano they
had hacked to pieces.

We were looking about at all this ruin, and
Billy was talking loudly of what devils the
Boches were, when an old man stepped up and
spoke to us. He was a wrinkled, white-haired,
stoop-shouldered old fellow, and his voice was
not much more than a whisper. He spoke in
broken English, with a lot of French words
mixed in, but Billy knew a little French, and we
managed to understand what he was saying.

He told us that for fifty years he had been a
servant of the family that owned the chateau.
When the Germans were coming through Bel-
gium the family had hurried over into France
just in time to escape, but the old man had said.

THE MAD WOMAN OF YPRES 95

**No ; I shall not go. This has been my home
always, and I shall live and die here.'^

Then his two grandsons — only boys they were,
younger than I — said they would stay with
their grandfather, no matter what might hap-
pen.

The Huns came, and the old man tried to keep
them out of the chateau, telling them it had
been left in his care and he must protect it,
but while he pleaded with them a soldier knocked
him down with his gun. The blow made him
unconscious for a while. When he came to life
again he found that he had been dragged out
into the garden and was lying there alone on
the ground.

After lying there some time, he managed to
get to his feet, and began to look about for his
grandsons. He couldn't find them. At last he
learned that the Germans had brought some
charge against them, and had marched them
away to be shot. He wouldn't believe it until
he found some persons who had seen them killed
and who told him everything. And they were
not the only young boys the Germans killed on
the charge of being spies or of firing on the sol-
diers.

96 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

*^Some day/' the old man said, ^^the master
and his family will come back and the old cha-
teau will be made over, but I may not live to
see that time. But I mean to live long enough
to see the Boches beaten and punished. I know
you will fight hard and win, you Englishmen.
It is the Lord's work you are doing."

More stories as dreadful as that old man 's we
heard as we went about over the country.
Women who had lost their husbands and chil-
dren told them to us. Children told them to
us who had lost their fathers and mothers.
And, oh, what hate their eyes showed as they
spoke of the Boches !

At one time while we were speaking with a
group of children and tr^^ing to teach them some
of the good old English songs, a woman came
up and questioned them one by one. It was
always the same question:

^'Have you seen my little Mimi?"

And the children would always shake their
heads.

A tall, fine-looking woman she was, with sad
eyes and a soft voice. After she had questioned
them all, she stood a moment staring at me,
then at Bonesey, then at Billy, without saying

THE MAD WOMAN OF YPRES 97

another word. And then she began to cry very
softly, and walked away.

**It's the mad woman,'' one of the children
told US, and we learned how the Huns had
killed her little Mimi, leaving the mother all
alone in the world, for her husband had fallen
while fighting for his country.

Hearing such dreadful things made us so sad
and gloomy that we were glad to get back to
where the Tommies could cheer us with their
jokes and their singing. Often I would lie
awake at night long after the other lads had
fallen asleep, and think over the stories I had
heard, and wonder whether savages had ever
been worse than those German devils that were
trying to wipe us out. I made up my mind to
kill as many of them as I could, and never to
try to take a prisoner. And I told myself, too,
that I should rather be killed than be taken pris-
oner by them. There are some kind Huns, I
suppose, just as there are kind savages, but I
had heard of some of our soldiers who had fallen
into the hands of the bad ones and who had been
tortured.

Glad we were when we could forget now and
then the mad country we were in and all the

98 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

mad things that were being done there, and
bring our thoughts back to the good old days in
England. It was good to hear old Bonesey tell
stories of his housebreaking and of how he
would manage to fool the bobbies. He didn't
always fool them, for he had been caught and
sent to prison several times, but he must have
been a clever lad in his line if half of what he
told us was true. I asked Martin, the Scotland
Yard man, about him one day, and he said,

^^Yes, your friend Bonesey is a hard un, and
some day when the war's over I may have to
send him to prison myself. But I hope not.
He's been too good a soldier. Better reform
him. Mascot, while you've the chance."

I did try to reform Bonesey, but it wasn't any
use.

^^Wot! Me be honest!" he would say, as he
winked one eye at Billy. **Why, bless yer
bloomin' 'eart, Mascot, I don't know wot bein'
honest is. Back to the 'ousebreakin' trade I'm
goin' when the war's over. But I'd sort of like
to get a V. C. meantimes. With that on me it
would sort of make me seem respectable in my
line of work."

** Don't you be trying to change a high-class

THE MAD WOMAN OF YPEES 99

burglar into something he's not fitted for/' put
in Billy. ^^Ever)^ man to his trade is what I
say, if he's good at it. There's chaplains I
know of that are such cowards they stay behind
the lines and wait for the dying soldiers to be
brought back before they'll pray over them.
And there's a lad I know who was only a beg-
gar in the streets of Liverpool before the war,
yet he's as brave as the best of them when it
comes to bringing in the wounded from out in
front. It's not what a man is outside, or what
he calls himself; it's what he is inside that
counts. Just remember — "

' ^ Aw, shut up with the preachin ', ' ' grumbled
Bonesey. ^^It's an actor you are, Billy Match-
ett, and I'm tellin' yer now you're no account
at the preachin'. A jail bird the Mascot 'ere
would be if he listened to you, for you're so
mixed up with wot you're tryin' to say that
you'd 'ave him believin' a burglar's honest- and
an honest man's a burglar. Every man to his
trade, and an actor to 'is, is wot I'm thinkin'."

CHAPTER XIII

SOLDIEES THREE

BECAUSE a tin rooster hung over the door,
Billy called it Chanticleer Tavern, but
it had a French name that I never could pro-
nounce. The mne they sold there was just to
Billy's taste, and, as there was good food too,
he and I were often in the Chanticleer together
of an evening. It w^as there that we met the
red-headed tanker, and his friends the one-eared
sniper and the fat miner.

They all three came in together one night and
sat down at our table. Being a chummy lot,
they were soon telling us of some of the things
they had been through. I thought I had had
a bit of adventure myself since coming to the
front, but it was nothing to what those three
lads had seen.

^^I was in a tank at the Somme, where we
gave the Boches the surprise of their lives,"
said the red-headed one, and he dipped a finger

100

SOLDIERS THREE 101

in his beer and drew wet lines on the table to
show how the trenches had lain.

^^Over here,'' he said, as he daubed with his
■finger, *^were the Boches, and over there were
we, and here was the river. The artillery had
been pounding the Boches hard, and there was
nothing much left of their front trenches, but
their fences were still up, and our infantry-
might have been shot to pieces before they
could get through them.

'' 'Twas then they sent us tankers into the
fight. Along we rattled, swaying and bumping
and rolling, with the bullets buzzing against our
old steel shell and making not so much as a dent.
And behind came the infantry, with us protect-
ing them. We got to those wire fences, and
we went through them without so much as a
pause, and the infantry poured in after through
the big lanes we made.

<<1'he ground was all full of shell holes, but
we never stopped. We would drop into a
crater, and climb out again, and into another
and up again, and though the old tank 'most
bumped the skyi off of us she never got a
puncture. She was afraid of nothing. Right
up to a machine gun she'd crawl, and look

102 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

at it, and blaze away at the gunners, then squash
right over it.

^^Of a sudden came a bump that sent us
sprawling against her insides and raised welts
all over us. She had tumbled into a crater
as big as a volcano 's, and we thought for a sec-
ond she was done for. But she righted herself
as easy as if she was a jumping kangaroo, and
went purring along as fresh and sound as ever.

*^That crater was full of Bodies — two hun-
dred of them at least, I should say, though we
didn't have time to do any counting. And as
we tumbled in we had squashed down on almost
half of them and flattened them out like pan-
cakes.

^^The rest were around us thick as flies, and
we blazed away at them with our guns, and
rolled over them, and backed up and rolled over
some more. They were running around like
rats in a pit with a dog after them. They came
swarming up over our shell, firing their pistols
at it and jabbing at it with their bayonets, but
they couldn't so much as scratch it.

^^Then, finding they couldn't rip us open, they
jumped down into the crater and rushed for the
sides, where they tried to climb out and escape.

SOLDIERS THREE 103

But we shot them down by dozens as they tried
it.

^^All along the line the other tanks were go-
ing ahead, through wires and over shell holes
and through big craters, just as we were, mow-
ing the Bodies down by hundreds. Nothing
could stop them. The infantry swept along
with them, fighting like devils, and we all had
the Huns scared blue. It was a great victory
we won that day, as you lads have doubtless
heard before.

* ' But maybe it wasn 't hot inside that old tank !
One hundred degrees and more, if it was any-
thing at all. Stripped to the waist we were,
and some of us stark naked, and the sweat was
running oif us in streams. And every time she
bumped into a hole we would go bumping
against her insides till we were scratched and
bruised and black and blue all over.

''And maybe the army didn't cheer us when
we got back! Oh, for a few minutes we lads
were the heroes. You should have heard the
regiments yell when they caught sight of us, all
bruised and black and grease-smeared as we
were.''

*' That's all well enough," spoke up the fat

104 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

man, "but I've been through more myself.''

He had eyes as round and sharp as a bird's,
that lad, and a neck like a bull's.

"I've been through more myself," be said,
"and I'll lay my pay that I've sent more Huns
to hell than ever did that blinkin ' tank of yours.
There was once we planted a string of mines
that blew up a whole German front line, and the
Boches were flying up in the air as thick as the
stones when the crash came. And most of 'em
came down in small pieces.

"There was another time when, as we were
burrowing out under No Man's Land we heard
the Huns scratching away close to us digging a
tunnel of their own. We broke the head of
our shaft into theirs, and there we were face to
face with 'em in the dark. It was dark enough
with the lights going, but they were put out,
and then it was black as ink. We groped for
those Huns down there under the ground where
we couldn't see our hands before our faces, and
we fought 'em with our picks. And some-
times we fought with our bare hands.

"I bumped into a man, and I didn't know
whether he was friend or foe till I'd taken him
by the throat and then had loosened his pipe

SOLDIERS THREE 105

a second to let him yell. When I heard him I
knew he was Boche, and I tightened up his pipe
again till he went limp in my hands.

^ ' Then the lights went out once more, and we
could see just enough to tell which were Boches
and which were our own. We cleaned out their
shaft without a shot fired, and the Huns over in
the trench never knew what was happening.
Then we went through their tunnel till we came
to their trench. We took a look into it, and saw
a lot of Germans close by. We tossed some
bombs into the thick of 'em and must have
cleaned up about twenty. And we got back to
our own line safe and sound except three lads
the Boches had killed while we were fighting in
the dark.''

The one-eared lad put his elbows on the ta-
ble and asked Billy for a fag. He was as thin
as the miner was fat, and the one ear that he
had left stuck out so straight that he had a
funny, lop-sided look.

**Now I'm not sayin' my two pals here
haven 't done a few things in this bloomin ' war, ' '
he said, as he struck a match, ^'but it's only once
in weeks they get a chance at the Boches, while
I'm the lad that's gettin' 'em all the time.

106 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

Snipin' is my job, and I Ve got upwards of two
hundred Huns to my credit by now.

^'One day I lay out in a clump of grass be-
hind our line when a new German regiment had
come up to the front. A green, careless lot they
were, and it was little they knew about us snip-
ers. Never have I had easier pickings than
those lads. Every few minutes one of 'em
would be sure to show himself a couple of inches
or so above the top, and if he was there more
than a second I'd be fairly sure to get him. I
kept count, and it was twenty-three men that
dropped to my gun that day.

''There was a hole in their parapet where
old-timers would have known enough to bend
down as they passed it, but it took a long time
for those new lads to learn that much. I'd
keep my blinkers on that spot, and every few
minutes a head would pass by and I'd let go at
it. I got a dozen in that one place."

''But it's little good you snipers are when
it comes to takin' trenches," put in the red-
headed tanker. "And you lie all day behind
the line in your clump of grass and run no
bloomin' danger at all to speak of. And you
have it cool and easy, while we tankers are

SOLDIERS THREE 107

sweatin^ and skinnin' our hides against the
iron. ' '

*^And are you tryin' to tell me we run no
danger? ^^ growled the sniper, putting his hand
over the place where his ear was missing.
** Where's that bloomin' ear of mine gone?
Tell me that now. It was shot off by a Boche
sniper, that's what it was. And when they find
out where we are their machine guns pepper us,
and we're lucky if we get away with our lives.
Danger! It's little a tanker knows about dan-
ger, stuck away safe inside his shell where the
bullets can't get him."

That's the way they were giving it to one
another, back and forth, when there came a
crash that sent the chairs from under us and
sent us sprawling on the floor. The whole
building rocked with it, and I thought the walls
were coming down. We ran out, and found that
a shell had exploded a few feet outside the
door. Just as we got outside another struck
close by. We must have broken some running
records for the next minute.

CHAPTEE XIV

BOMBS

UP to the trenches again we went when we
had been two weeks in rest billets. They
were not the same trenches we had left, for the
whole line had been pushing forward while we
were resting. Fritzie had been getting a hard
pounding day after day, and he must have been
sorry more than once that he started that war.
Part of our new trench ran . into a wood,
which was a black, creepy-looking place at
night. There had been more than one hot fight
in that gloomy spot, and many men had been
killed there. The trees were all torn by shell
fire, and many of them were no more than
stripped, dead trunks, sticking up like poles.
I didn't like that wood. It looked so dismal
that it took the heart out of me every time I
set my eyes on it. I never looked at it that
I didn't think of all the lads that had fallen there
and of those that had lain for hours wounded

108

BOMBS 109

and suffering under the trees. It's strange
what a difference the bright sunshine makes.
If it hadn't been for those trees and the dark
shadows they cast I shouldn't have thought half
so much about all the terrible things that had
happened on that bit of ground.

As for the trench, it was about as bad as the
one we had been in before, and we knew that
if it rained we should be wallowing in mud
again.

*^I hear some of the Huns have pianos, and
electric lamps, and arm-chairs and nice cement
floors and walls in their trenches," said Big
Tom. *^How'd you like to be one of them
Huns ? Never any mud, and when you want to
have a little rest and a smoke there's a nice
plush-covered easy chair for you with a foot-
stool in front of it. And when you're feeling
blue you go and play a little piece on the piano.
Wish we could find a trench like that. I'm
thinkin' the Boches wouldn't keep it long."

We thought Big Tom was joking, but later
we met men who had captured cement-lined
trenches and who had seen officers' dug-outs so
grand that a prince would think he was back
home in his palace.

110 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

*'I wonder if there are any rats in this new
hole they Ve brought us to, ' ' said Billy.

He found out when he crept into his dug-out
for the night. The rats were there all right.
And so was the mud. The lads that built that
trench hadn't taken any lessons from the Huns
with the pianos.

Fritzie gave us a warm welcome by sending
over a lot of trench-mortar bombs, along with
other presents, such as whiz-bangs, pip-squeaks
and minniewurfers. They always had been
generous with gifts of that sort, but they were
more free-handed than usual when we arrived.
I suppose they wanted to make sure we knew
they were there.

The trench mortar would go oif with a big
click, so we knew the bomb was coming a second
or two before it reached us. When we heard
the click we would dive for the dug-outs. We
heard the click the very first day in the trench,
and I and two other lads tumbled into a dug-
out that was right behind us so fast that we
sprawled over one another. Then we heard
the bomb hit the ground with a thud. About a
second later it went off. We heard the timbers
crashing around us, and the whole dug-out went

BOMBS 111

to pieces. I thought that ended the war for us.
We were buried under earth and timbers, and
everything went black.

I was a bit surprised when I discovered I
wasn^t dead. I couldn't move and there must
have been a ton of stuff on top of me, but I
could breathe, and I didn't feel any pain. In
a few minutes they dug us out, and the three
of us were as sound as ever except for a few
scratches and a lot of dirt in our eyes and
mouths.

^^It's well for the Fighting Fifth that they
didn't kill our mascot," said Billy. ^*Our luck
would have been spoiled for the rest of the
war. ' '

^^No need to worry," put in Big Tom.
**We'd get another mascot soon enough. Any-
thing will do for a mascot — a cat, a dog, or any
old thing; it don't matter so long as we've got
one. And one kind's as lucky as another."

It wasn't long before Fritzie got a lesson from
us about how to use bombs. One day a man
named Edwards, who came from near my home
in Liverpool, where I had known him well, and
who had fought in South Africa, said he thought
we had stood about enough from the Germans

112 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and that he was going to take some of the fresh-
ness out of them.

That evening he went over the top alone with
a load of bombs. It was fairly dark, and there
was a mist hanging close to the ground, so the
Germans didn't see him coming. He crawled
up to their trench, pulled out his wire cutter,
made a hole in their fence and went through.
The Germans didn't get sight of him till he
jumped right in on top of them. He had a
bomb in his hand and when he struck the bottom
of the trench he held it up so they could all see
it, and said, loud enough for them to hear:

^^ Hands up, or I'll give you this to whack
amongst you!"

I don't know whether they understood what
he said, they being nothing but Germans, but
they saw the bomb all right, and they knew
what was going to happen if their hands didn't
go up. So up their hands went.

He managed to bring every one of those Huns
back with him to our line/ — sixteen of them.

He missed the honour that was coming to him,
for he was killed the next day, but his widow
got the military cross for what he had done.

CHAPTEK XV

GEOPING IN THE DAKK

A FEW days later a patrol party was being
made up, and I wanted to be in it. The
Sergeant wouldn't take me at first, saying I was
too young for such work, but he changed his
mind later, and I went along.

There were fifteen of us, and every one in the
lot was glad of the chance. We waited till some
time after dark, and then we stole out. It
couldn't have been a better night for a patrol,
for it was as black as ink — no moon, no stars,
and a thick fog that hung close to the ground.
We couldn 't see three feet in front of us, and the
Huns didn't have a blooming chance of seeing
us. Close together we kept, for we had to. We
would never have found one another again if
we had got separated. The Sergeant had a
compass — an illuminated one that shone in the
dark — and that showed us the way.

We made straight for the Germans ' line, for
the Sergeant had a plan for dropping a few

113

114 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

bombs into their trencli. He kept count of his
steps, measuring the distance as well as he
could, and when he thought we must be close
to their wires we all got down and crawled.

Just then a star-shell went up that sent a
blaze of light through the fog. The fence was
so close that we could have reached out and
touched it. And right in front of us we got
sight of a German guard looking over the top.
We heard him give a surprised grunt, and we
knew he had seen us. The next second his gun
went ofP, and one of our men gave a groan
and rolled over, dead. Maybe we didn't do
some fast crawling after that!

^^Keep down!'' our Sergeant whispered.
^ ^ Drop into the first shell hole you find. ' '

The Huns' typewriters were going, and we
could hear the bullets singing over our heads.
Then a star-shell went up, and we stopped till
the light went out. "We had crawled a few
yards and were beginning to think the worst was
over, when we heard the thud of a bomb hitting
the ground close by. I could hear my heart
beat as I waited for the crash. I might have
tried running, but I didn't know where the
thing lay, whether in front of us or behind.

GROPING IN THE DAEK 115

and it was about as safe to lie still as to take
a chance of diving right into it.

It must have been fairly close, for the crash
lifted me right up from the ground a foot or
two. I came down with a bump that knocked
the breath out of me, and the flying earth came
down over me in a shower.

I expected another one to come any second,
and I crawled off as fast as I could. After a
minute I stopped and listened, but there wasn't
a sound but the typewriters.

*^I'm lost!'' I told myself. ^^ Where's the
'blooming Sergeant and his compass?"

I didn't know north, south, east nor west.
There wasn 't anything to do but keep on crawl-
ing and trust to luck, and for all I knew I might
have to crawl around in No Man 's Land all night
and find myself out there for the Germans to
shoot in a nice clear sunrise.

After a few minutes I found a shell hole, and
dropped into it. It wasn't a very big one but
good enough for night time. I lay there a
while thinking hard. There were several things
I thought of doing. I could stay where I was,
get my bearings when the sun came up, lie there
all day, and crawl over to our trench after dark.

116 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

But that would mean a whole day "without food
and with not much water, and the shell hole
wasn't any too big for day-time. Or I could
crawl about till I found a bigger shell hole,
and try the same plan there. But if I should
do that there was danger of getting up against
the German wires and being seen again.

^^Oh, keep on crawling,'' I said to myself,
^^and take a chance. I'm as likely to get killed
one way as another. ' '

So I crawled about till the clothes were al-
most worn off me, and after a time the machine
guns weren't so noisy and I got to my feet and
walked.

I must have been walking for at least an
hour, and going around in circles, I suppose, for
I hadn't come to either the Huns' line or ours,
when I bumped square into a man. I jumped
back, and so did he. We were both scared half
to death. "We had both jumped so far that
we could scarcely see each other in the fog, but
it seemed to me I had caught sight of our own
uniform. I made ready to run at him with the
bayonet in case of need, and then I whispered
at him.

'*I say, you little blinkin' beggar," he called

GROPING IN THE DARK 117

back, *^youVe shortened my bloomin' life ten
years with the fright I got ; that 's what you Ve
done. ' '

It was old ** Piccadilly Charlie," one of our
patrol.

I asked him if he knew where our trench lay,
but he was just as much lost as I was. He had
crawled away when the bomb blew up and had
been roaming about alone trying to make up his
mind what to do.

^^I'm thinkin', Mascot," said Charlie, ^^that
it's best to just keep on walkin'. If there was
any other w^ay of passin' the time, well and good,
but there ain't."

It must have been about half an hour later
that we came up against some wires.

^^It's an even chance whether it's the Huns or
our own," said Charlie.

We found a break in the fence, and crawled
through. Charlie was just ahead of me. He
had ahnost reached the sand bags, when he
turned and came crawling back. I knew what
that meant. We got through the hole in the
fence again, crawled for a few yards, and then
walked. Knowing where the Germans were
helped us a little, for we could keep on going

118 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

straight for a few yards, an}^vay. As it hap-
pened, we must have gone fairly straight all the
way, for before long we found ourselves in
front of our own trench.

The Sergeant and six others, one with his
hand blown off, had got there before us. Two
others came in the next night, having lain in a
shell hole all day. Two nights later a patrol
party found the body of another blown to pieces.
What became of the rest I don't know.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LOW-DOWN CUR

THERE were a few new soldiers in our com-
pany when we came out of rest billets.
One of them was a tall, lank, shifty-eyed lad
called '^ Spike.'' I didn't like the look of him
from the first time I set eyes on him. He was
a bad one. I'd have laid my pay to that.
There were men among us who knew all about
him, and they said he had never done an honest
day's work in his life till the army took him,
and that he had been known as a killer back in
Liverpool.

** Watch out for that rat-eyed blighter," Big
Tom told us. ^^I'm saying he's a low-down
cur, and that's not saying half enough about
him."

Spike didn't have a friend in the trench ex-
cept a lad who had been trying ever since he got
to the front to get somebody to shoot otf his
trigger finger so he could get back to Blighty.

119

120 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

The rest of us kept away from him as much as
we could.

Spike had heard that Big Tom had been
saying things about him, and he swore he would
get even some day.

* * And he will, too, if he gets the chance, ' ' said
Big Tom. ^^He was behind the bars once for
knifing a man in the back, and he 's thinking like
as not about doing that same thing to me. I
know the kind he is. He'd never meet a man
face to face, not he."

Not many men like Spike were among us, but
there were a few, and some black stories were
being told about two or three of them. If a
man wanted to do murder he could find no bet-
ter place than the front for it, because he could
blame it on the Germans and nobody would
know the difference. And such things had been
done in the trenches, so the stories went.

^* We've had others like this new-comer," said
a chunky little chap who was known as ' * Spud. ' '
' ^ There was that fox-faced bloke who was killed
last week for one. I've been thinking he got
what he deserved when the shell hit him. It was
no Hun bullet that killed old Kelly a month
ago. It was that fox-faced blighter's gun that

THE LOW-DOWN CUR 121

did it. He had sworn he'd get him, and when
Kelly fell he was close beside him and his gun
was smoking. It's easy getting away with a
deed like that out here."

A few days later Bonesey caught Spike steal-
ing his fags. Bonesey was a good-natured lad
as a rule, but before he had managed to get those
cigarettes he had gone without smoking for
three days, except when he picked up a butt
some officer had dropped, and he was red hot
with rage when he caught Spike trying to steal
them. Spike got a blow in the jaw that sent him
sprawling in the mud. When he picked himself
up he was feeling of his teeth to see if they were
all there.

**You got what was coming to you," I told
him. ^* Anybody who'll steal fags should get
worse than that."

He squinted his eyes and looked me up and
down.

'^I'd hand yer one, ye little devil," he
growled, *^if it wasn't for the big friends you've
got about yer. But wait a while. There's
some here that's got something comin' to 'em
from me and they'll get it some day."

**Some night yer mean," said Bonesey.

122 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

* ' Some time in the dark and be 'ind their backs.
I knows the kind of muck you come from. I
may not be much to brag of me self, but if I
wasn't a few shades better than you I'd put a
bullet through me 'ead.''

Spike slunk away, but we knew there was
murder in his heart.

** There's three of us 'e's got marked for fu-
ture reference," said Bonesey. *^I'm one,
you're another, Big Tom's a third. Watch out,
lad."

Spike kept away from us as much as he could
after that. He was a lonely beggar, with
scarcely a word for anybody, but the surly look
in his eyes told us fairly well what he was think-
ing about.

It happened a little later that he and Big
Tom were on night guard at the same time.
Our line never ran straight but was all curls
and angles, and between their two posts the
trench bent backward like a letter V. Tom was
on one side of the V and Spike on the other,
and they were not more than fifty yards apart.
The night was so black that they couldn't see
each other, but each knew exactly where the
other was.

THE LOW-DOWN CUR 123

Before long a bullet came sputtering into the
sand bags at the spot where Big Tom stood. A
few minutes later another struck in the same
place^ and Tom began to think it queer that
the two had found the same mark on a quiet
night when the Huns were doing so little shoot-
ing.

He took a peek over the top and at the same
moment an exploding shell sent a dazzling light
over the trench. Just as the shell exploded
something struck his helmet, and he fell over to
the bottom. He picked himself up unhurt, but
the top of his helmet had a hole in it. It was
not such a hole as a bit of a shell would have
made but had been drilled by a bullet.

Big Tom knew who had sent that bullet, but he
said nothing about it till the next evening, when
I heard him telling the story.

^^Full well I knew he was going to do some-
thing of the kind sooner or later, ^' he was say-
ing, ^ ^ but my mind was running on other things
than him last night, and I didn't expect it.
Then those two bullets came plunk into the sand
bags and set me wondering. When the shell
exploded my face was toward the spot where
that blighter was posted, and for half a second

124 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

I saw him plainer than if the sun had been up.
He was just going to shoot, and, so help me ! his
gun was pointing straight at me. Don't tell
me it wasn't his bullet that got me. I know
better."

So, as if the danger from the Huns wasn't
bad enough, it was plain murder we must guard
against. We were not afraid of the Boches any
longer because we had been fighting them so
long, but we were afraid of Spike. He was as
sly and tricky as any German, and he had a
better chance at us than they had. They would
have to fight hard to get at us and risk their
lives doing so, but Spike could strike from be-
hind us or shoot close by from the dark with
small danger to himself.

^^I'm thinkin' some of us would better 'ave a
little talk with that gay lad and put some fear
into 'is black 'eart," Bonesey suggested.

But Big Tom shook his head.

'' 'Twould do little good," he said. ^^He's
an old timer at dirty tricks, and there's no
scarin' him. We got to be careful, that's all.
He may get one of us and he may not. If he 's
a bullet in his belt that's got my number or
yours you or me will get it sooner or later."

THE LOW-DOWN CUR 125

From that night on I kept the tail of my eye
on Spike, and whenever I knew he was near me
in the dark my nerves would start ajumping.

CHAPTER XVII

BONESEY BECOMES A HERO

VERY soon we had other troubles to worry-
over, and for the time we forgot about
Spike. The German artillery opened up on us,
and while the shelling lasted our trench was
dreadfully unhealthy. In all the time we had
been at the front we never had had such a dose
from the big guns as we got then.

^^Lie down and duck your heads when you
hear a shell coming,'' an officer sung out to us
just after the first one had struck close by.

The next minute we heard another one on the
way, and we all went down on our knees or our
stomachs. We put our hands over our eyes so
that we should not be blinded if flying splinters
came our way, and waited for the explosion.
The thing burst a few yards off and spattered
us with dirt.

Then a shrapnel shell burst just over us, so
close that I felt the heat of it. I thought I was
done for that time, and it surprised me when

126

BONESEY BECOMES A HERO 127

I couldn't feel any pain. I twitched my arms
and legs to make sure there was nothing wrong
with them, and they moved easily enough, but
I couldn't understand why none of that shrap-
nel had hit me when it was flying all around
me as thick as flies. At least one poor chap
hadn't been so lucky, for I heard a cry for
stretcher-bearers.

** Blimey! That was a bad one!" said the
lad next to me. *'Must have copped more than
one of us. We'll all go west if many more like
that come this way. ' '

^* Spud's down," somebody called.

*^Aye! And three more. Hope there's no
more shrapnel comin'."

A wounded man was groaning dreadfully
somewhere near. Then another shell came and
sent the dirt flying over us again. Every min-
ute one flew over us, sometimes sending splint-
ers into the trench, and most of the time we were
on our knees or our stomachs with our hands
over our eyes.

I thought that shelling would never stop.
There's nothing worse than heavy shell fire,
the awful noise of it, the flying splinters and the
thinking that every minute that passes may be

128 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

your last. Give me bullets, give me rain and
mud, give me rats and cooties, anything but
shell fire. I'd have gone through No Man's
Land twice over if I had had my choice, rather
than spend ^ve minutes in a trench where the
shells were flying. The waiting for each shell
to burst and the shock from the crash of them
gets on a lad's nerves till he shakes all over.

For two hours the shelling lasted, and then of
a sudden stopped. We got up and stretched
ourselves, and we all looked as if we hadn't slept
for a week^all of us that were left, for the
stretcher-bearers had been busy and there was
many a face I missed. For a long time my head
buzzed from the noise of the shells and every
nerve in my body was on the jump.

A little later a sentry caught sight of a
wounded man out in front. We thought he
must be one of a small raiding party that had
gone out the night before. Almost every one
of us took chances with bullets to take a look at
him from over the top. Every little while he
would wave his hand to call our attention to
him, even though it brought the danger of
being seen by the Boches, who would have fired
on him if they had known he was alive.

BONESEY BECOMES A HERO 129

It was dreadful to see him lying suffering out
there, probably with no water left in his bottle,
while we knew we could do nothing to help
him. It was hot, hot as blazes, and he was ly-
ing with his face to the glaring sun. And we
could only watch him suffer!

*^ Blimey! I can^t stand lookin' at him any
more,'' said Tom, who had a soft heart in his
big body. ^^If it wasn't that I have a wife
and children at home I'd go out after him. I
would that."

<< 'Twould be no more than foolishness," the
Sergeant told him. ^^You wouldn't live to get
half way. What's the sense in committing sui-
cide?"

i i There 'd be just a chance if 'twas dark, ' ' said
Bonesey, *^and it will be that when night falls,
for the moon don't get up till late."

<< There might be," the Sergeant said; '^and
again there might not. The Boches were never
so wide awake as these last few days."

*^Who is the poor bloke lying out there?"
somebody asked. ^^ Anybody know?"

The Sergeant shook his head.

**Five men were missing from that last pa-
trol party when it got back. He may be any

130 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

one of those five. Or he may have been out
there for days. Perhaps he's been lying in a
shell hole, where we couldn't see him, and has
managed to crawl out of it. Anyway, he's one
of our own men. I got a good look at him and
I know that."

*^The Germans will get sight of him soon if
he keeps on signalling," said Billy. ^^It's a
pity we can't let him know we've seen him so
he'll lie quiet."

After a time Bonesey stepped up to me look-
ing solemn as an owl.

^^ Mascot," he said, '^I'm thinkin' some one of
us blokes should go out and bring that lad in,
whoever he may be."

*^I'm too small," I said. *'I couldn't carry
him."

*^ 'Ow about me?" said Bonesey. *^I've no
woman nor kids. 'Twould be better to get shot
out there than while sneakin' through some rich
bloke's 'ouse back 'ome. 'Twould sort of im-
prove me reputation with Scotland Yard, I'm
thinkin'."

All the rest of the day I couldn't get the
wounded man out of my mind. Every lad in
the trench looked serious; there was never a

BONESEY BECOMES A HERO 131

smile nor a laugh, for how could we be cheerful
while that poor suffering chap lay out there just
beyond us signalling for help and not getting
it I It was the first day that passed without a
song, and even Billy, who was the finest singer
in the lot and one of the joUiest, never raised
his voice.

A little after dark Bonesey said to the Ser-
geant :

<<I^ni goin^ over the top to bring 'im in. The
Bodies won^t see me now.''

The Sergeant nodded, and Bonesey went up
the ladder.

^^Hug the ground,'' the Sergeant called after
him. '^ Don't lift your head, or they'll get you
sure. And don't forget to lie still whenever
they send up a light."

I wished the night had been darker, for
though the moon wasn't up the stars were shin-
ing iij a clear sky and we could see all the way
across to the German line. Yet it might have
been worse, for there was hardly any rifle firing
at the time and the heavies and the typewriters
were as quiet as a church.

I climbed up and watched Bonesey on his way.
He was too wise a lad to take foolish chances

132 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and was moving along almost flat to the gromid
and as slow as a turtle. He was well beyond
the wires when a star-shell went up and sent
a glare over him. I could feel my heart jump.
But he lay as still as a dead man while the
light lasted, and no shot came his way. A mo-
ment later he went out of sight in some dip in
the ground or a shell hole, and I didn't see him
again for a long time. Then I heard somebody
cry:

< i There he is ! Strike me pink ! He 's got
him! He's got him!"

And, so help me! he had got him. He was
crawling mth the wounded lad on his back.
It was slow work over that rough ground, with
a shell hole in the way every few feet, and I
couldn 't see how the Germans could help seeing
him, but there was no sign that they did. I
could hardly breathe as I waited for the next
light to go up. They would surely see him
then, I thought.

He was half way back when the light broke.
He stopped and lay low, but the wounded man
on top of him was a mark the Boches couldn't
fail to see. Bullets began to fly, and the lights
went up one after another in quick succession.

BONESEY BECOMES A HEEO 133

Bonesey and Ms man got into a shell hole, and
lay there for a good half hour. Then they came
in sight, not twenty yards away. The Germans
saw them, and began firing again. When close
to our line Bonesey stopped crawling, got to
his feet and broke into a run. It takes a strong
man to do that with such a weight on his back.
He got to our parapet, and two men climbed up
to help him down.

Bonesey hadn't so much as a scratch, but the
man he had brought in lay still and his eyes were
closed.

** A bullet got 'im as I was crawlin' with 'im,' '
Bonesey said. ^^I fear 'e's done for.''

The Sergeant knelt over the poor chap and
found the bullet hole in the back of his head.
He was stone dead.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MAN" FKOM AMERICA

DON'T let me forget the man from America,
for I have been so busy telling about the
fighting that I haven't mentioned that chummy
lad who, when we were feeling blue and home-
sick and things were at their worst, made us
forget the shells, the rats, the mud and all our
troubles as he told us of his adventures in
strange lands.

His name was McBride. A tall, skinny chap
he was, ^vith a twinkle in his eyes and a good
word for everybody. He was one of the new
men in our company, and from that trench he
was getting his first look at the war.

Many a queer story McBride told us of dig-
ging gold in the Klondike, of hunting bears in
the Rocky Mountains, of cowboy life on the
plains, for he had been everyv\^here in America
where there was adventure to be found.

**Now let me ask yer, did yer ever see any
Indians?'' Piccadilly said to him one day.

134

THE MAN FEOM AMERICA 135

^^Sure," McBride answered. ^'Lots of 'em.
I've fought against 'em when they were try-
ing to raid New York City. We drove 'em
back into Jersey, where they got away in the
woods."

''What yer givin' us!" growled Piccadilly,
his little eyes getting red, as they always did
when he was angry. ''Do yer think I know
no more of America than to swallow one like
that? There's no Indians within two hundred
miles of New York."

"You're right," spoke up McBride, without
so much as blinking. "Did I say New York?
It was a slip of the tongue. It was Buffalo I
meant. ' '

"That's more like it," said Piccadilly.

"They came again a few days later," Mc-
Bride went on, "and did a war dance around
the edge of the town. Then they raided us,
waving their tomahawks and yelling fit to
freeze your blood. They captured the mayor,
tied him to a stake, stuck pine needles into his
skin and set fire to them. Then they scalped
him. We rescued him just in time, but he 's had
to wear a toupee ever since."

' ' You should have fighting enough over there.

136 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

without comin' to this bloomin' place," Picca-
dilly said, as he puffed his cigarette.

*^I wanted a change,'^ McBride explained.
*^And I thought I'd like to see England and
take a squint at the King."

**It's easy seein' 'im," Bonesey put in.
'^I've met 'im 'undreds of times as he strolled
along the street with a gold crown on 'is 'ead,
an ermine robe flappin' round 'im and a big
cigar between 'is teeth."

Of course old Bonesey was spoofing the Yan-
kee lad — '^stringing" or ''joshing" as they say
in America.

''We've kings of our own," McBride said.
' ' Oil kings, steel kings, soap kings, all kinds of
kings. Whenever one of 'em wants to build a
new palace he levies an extra tax on his sub-
jects, and without the trouble of asking his
parliament about it, either. Any one of 'em is
so rich he could buy all of King George 's crown
jewels and give 'em to the kids for playthings."

This McBride was much given to boasting,
though not so much about himself as of his coun-
try. He thought the war would be over very
soon now that the Yankees were coming in.

"We used to think that if we sent the Giants

THE MAN FROM AMERICA 137

or the Red Sox over here we could clean np
most of Europe without much trouble/' he said,
^^but it looks now as if we'd have to send a few
of our regiments. When they get here we'll
lead you straight through to Berlin without
stopping, and we'll have the Kaiser singing
*The Star Spangled Banner' and wishing he'd
never sunk the Lusitania. We 're going to take
him back with us and put him in the Central
Park Zoo."

But even with all his boasting we all liked
him well, and there was never a time when he
wasn't glad to cheer us up a bit with his tales of
the wild places he had lived in. Listening to
him brought back my old longing to take to
the sea and visit such places as he had seen.
He had even been in the West Indies and the
ports of the old-time buccaneers, and like as
not had seen the very island that Jim Hawkins
told about.

** There's many an island I've been to down
in those seas," he told me, ^Hhat was once the
hiding place of pirate gold. And there's plenty
of the gold buried on some of 'em to this day.
Men still go digging for it, though it's only
once in a half -century or so that they iind any

138 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

worth mentioning. But it's the Klondike you
should go to, son, if it's adventure you're look-
ing for. If your luck's with you you'll find
gold; if not you may starve or freeze to death
hunting for it. No need of going to war for
excitement when there are such places as that
scattered over the map. But you want to take
a wad of money with you, for prices are way
up. I've been in Dawson when eggs were five
dollars apiece, and if you took a girl into a
restaurant and bought her a couple of 'em
fried she'd be yours for life. There was a one-
eyed, ugly-looking guy there who stole the
belle of the town away from as handsome a
feller as you ever set eyes on and who couldn't
understand how it had been done till he found
the one-eyed guy had been buying her fried
eggs."

He told us of his life in the high mountains,
of the bears he tracked through the forests, of
the mountain lions that came prowling down to
his camp after dark and howled all night, and
there wasn't a man among us who didn't wish
he was out of the blooming war and in some such
place as that.

^* That's the life son," he would say. *'It

THE MAN FROM AMERICA 139

beats the trenches; and, believe me, I'm going
back to it as soon as this fuss is over."

The bullets would be flying over us and the
big guns roaring as he told his stories, but I
didn't seem to hear them at all. I was way
over there in America, in the places he was tell-
ing about, digging gold and hunting bears.

CHAPTER XIX

ON THE MAKCH

GOOD news came at last. We were going to
leave Ypres. Where they were going to
send us we didn't know, but somewhere south.
But, wherever it was, we learned there would be
days of marching, instead of being cooped up
like rats in the dirty trenches.

We didn't shed any tears over leaving that
old hole in the ground, but we were sorry for
the poor chaps who relieved us, for we knew
what we had been through and what they would
have to put up with after us.

On a fine starlit night we filed out to the rear
with our big packs on our shoulders, and struck
into the road. There were thousands of other
men on that road, all coming up to the Ypres
front, and we cheered them as they marched by,
regiment after regiment. They were all sing-
ing, and we gave them song for song. I won-
dered where they had come from and what
fights they had been in, for they were no new

140

ON THE MAKCH 141

soldiers just over, but old veterans, who had
been in many a battle. A jolly crowd they were.
Little they cared what trouble might be wait-
ing for them ahead. They had been through so
much that nothing more could worry them.

Sometimes the road was so crowded that
we had to pass in single file, exchanging jokes
with the lads who were passing us and telling
them w^hat nice trenches we had left for them
at Ypres. Sometimes all of us, those coming
and going, would have to get out of the way
for the ammunition wagons that came banging
and rattling along with mules and horses at a
gallop. Sometimes at a big bend in the road
we could see the lighted ends of the soldiers'
cigarettes trailing along for a mile or more, like
a file of fireflies.

Till long after midnight we marched, halting
now and then to rest beside the road, and at
last we turned in for some sleep in an open
field just outside a little village.

Oh, it felt good to be out in the open country
again, away from the shells and the bullets, and
to lie out in the green grass and the flowers and
listen to the frogs singing in the marshes. I
was tired from the march, but I lay awake for

142 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

an hour listening to those croaking frogs and
looking over to the little village that was such a
pretty sight against the sky.

When the sun came up the birds were singing
all around us, and I felt as fresh as a daisy. We
fell in after breakfast and took the road that
led through the village. Our band was play-
ing, and we were all singing as we trailed along
behind it, for it was singing that made the
marching easy and kept our spirits up. When
we got to the cobble-stoned village streets the
band began to play *^ Columbia the Gem of the
Ocean, '^ and you should hiave heard the women
and children cheer the tune and clap their hands
as we went swinging by.

' ' That 's the stuff ! ' ' McBride cried. ' ' That 's
the best tune I've heard since I've been at the
front. I'm fed up with ^God Save the King'!"

A few moments later the band gave us ' ' The
Star Spangled Banner, ' ' and that American be-
gan to yell like a savage.

'*Sing it, fellers! Give us the grand old
song!" he cried.

And sing it we did — those of us that knew
the words. The regiments that passed us on
their way to Ypres took it up from us, and in

ON THE MARCH 143

a few minutes there were miles of Britishers
singing the American song.

We passed through so many villages that day
that I lost count of them, and in each one the
women and children and old men came out to
welcome us. We were near the edge of France,
and often they were singing *'The Marseillaise'^
as we passed.

About dark we halted for the night at a place
that had been fairly well banged to pieces by
the Boches. Half the cottages were without
roofs, and the little church had lost its tower.
But the Boches had been gone for many months,
and the village was as peaceful as a graveyard
now.

^^I want a bath,'' said Billy, ^^and I know
where I'm going to get it. There's a brook not
far from here. Come on. Mascot. ' '

^^I'm thinkin' you should 'ave been born a
duck or a fish," grumbled Bonesey. **I never
knew such a bloke for wantin' to dabble in the
water. You'll wash the 'ide off of yer some
day. It ain't 'ealthy, so much bathin'." *

So Bonesey left us and went hunting for a
place where he could buy some beer, and Billy
and I went off through the fields toward the

144 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

brook. We found it in a little wood — as fine a
brook as I ever saw, with clear, cool water, and
shiny pebbles underneath. We stripped and
splashed into it in a hurry, and oh, how good it
felt! The dirt was caked into us and we didn't
have any soap, but we lay on the pebbly bottom
and soaked till we got half-way clean. When
we came out we found a patch of soft moss and
we lay there till we were dry, for the evening
was warm.

Then we strolled back to the village, where
we found a woman who could speak a little
English and who told us how she and her chil-
dren had lived in her cellar for two days while
the Germans were shelling the place. She had
heard from the soldiers that had passed through
on their way toward Ypres that there was big
fighting going on to the south of us and that
the Germans were getting the worst of it.

^'That's what they're sending us into," said
Billy. *^ There's lively times ahead, lad."

The villagers took as many of our men into
their houses as they had room for, but Billy,
Bonesey and I slept in the open again and we
were glad to be out there rather than under a
roof, since the night was clear and dry. But

ON THE MARCH 145

luck turned against us, for along toward morn-
ing it began to rain. When day broke it was
coming down in sheets, and the cheer had all
gone out of us. We fell into line for the march
sopping wet, and the whole company w^as
grumbling and swearing, for they couldn't even
smoke, the rain was so heavy.

Eegiments were still going past us, and they
were a dreary-looking crowd in the storm.
Never a song was heard, and even the bands had
stopped playing. Now and then some of the
lads passing by would call out something about
hot times to the south, so we knew the woman
in the village had told us the truth and that we
were in for it. But there w^asn't a sign of
trouble so far, and the woods and fields were as
quiet as if the war were a hundred miles away.

All day we marched, stopping every two or
three hours for rest, and the rain never stopped.
The wind was blowing in our faces, and the
storm half blinded us. The water made our
packs and our clothes as heavy as lead and
squirted from our shoes with every step.

**This bloomin' battalion's got a curse on it,"
grumbled Bonesey. ^^Nothin' but trouble for
us poor blokes wherever we goes."

CHAPTER XX

SINKING IN THE BOG

THx\T night we spent in the sopping fields
beside the road. All night the rain came
down, with never a let-up, and when morning
broke it was still with us. All day we marched
through it, silent and glum, and whenever a
voice was raised it was only to grumble and
growl and curse.

^^I ^opes yer gettin' washin' enough to sat-
isfy yer for the time,^' Bonesey called to Billy.
*^Yer won't be cryin' for a bath again just yet
I'm thinkin'.''

Billy was too much fed up with trouble to
answer. Never had I known a time when there
were fewer words passed along the line ; and so
it was all day — not a joke nor a song.

Then another night in the wet. Yet we slept
like the dead, for we were nigh to being done
for from the weight of our packs and the beat-
ing of the wind and rain against us. When the

146

SINKING IN THE BOG 147

bugles called us up in the cold, gray dawn the
rain was coming down as hard as ever.

^ ^ If only I 'ad a dry fag now I could bear up
and be a bit cheery," Bonesey grumbled, ^^but
me smokes are soaked through and spoiled,
hevery one of 'em. Any bloke got a dry fag
about 'im!"

' ' 'Ear 'im ! 'As any bloke got a dry fag ! ' '
came from somewhere in the line. ^^Wot does
'e think it's been doin' these last days and
nights? 'E must 'ave dreamt the sun was
shinin '. There 's not a dry fag in the bloomin '
army. ' '

And the lad was right; there wasn't a dry
thing of any kind in the blooming army, not
even our skins, for we were as well soaked as if
we had dropped into a pond with our clothes on.

Along toward the end of the day there came
a grumbling and a roaring from the south.

^* There's thunder," said Piccadilly. ^^That
don 't sound much like it was go in ' to clear. ' '

*^ Thunder me eye!" growled the Sergeant.
^^It'sguns."

The noise grew louder as we marched on, and
it was as the Sergeant had told us ; it was the
guns. "We were getting near the fighting,

148 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

though it was little we felt like going into more
trouble than we had already. The fighting
blood was all soaked out of us. For once I
hated to think of going into battle. I wanted
to see the sun shine and to be out lying in the
grass in the dry, open fields again, with every-
thing quiet and peaceful, and the birds sing-
ing.

Maybe our officers knew what was ahead of
us in the way of fighting and knew just where
we were going to, but they never let us poor
Tommies know about such things. It was just
follow orders with us, and ask no questions. It
was just work and march and fight with us and
bear our troubles as well as we might, while the
officers did the thinking and got whatever in-
formation there was and kept their mouths shut
about it. But we couldn't help wondering
where the battle was, and how it was going,
and whether the Bodies were getting beaten or
our line was breaking. And the only answer
we got to all the questions we asked ourselves
was the roaring of those guns.

^ ^They're speakin' to us,'' said Bonesey.
* ^They're sayin', ' 'Urry up! 'Urry up!

SINKING IN THE BOG 149

'Urry up and get into the fight!' And that's
the only word that ever comes for us poor tired
beggars."

We got into the edge of the fuss the next day,
when shrapnel began to crack over our heads.
A shell exploded in a cottage a few hundred
yards away, and up shot a mass of black smoke
and flying dust and bricks. When the smoke
cleared away the cottage was gone. There
wasn't even a scrap of a wall left.

The Boches had the range of our road, so
we turned off from it to get away from their
fire, and struck through the fields. Sometimes
we were pushing through the long, wet grass,
but often we were wallowing in ploughed
ground, where the mud was over our ankles and
the going was hard enough to take the heart
out of the strongest of us.

At last we came back to the road, and soon we
began to see the signs of the fighting. Artil-
lery limbers were rolling along the cross-roads
through the driving rain with ammunition,
and galloping horses were dragging empty lim-
bers back for more. Eed Cross motors came
in sight, moving carefully along full of wounded

150 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

men. Then a group of the wounded came walk-
ing by, and, for all their hurts and their drip-
ping clothes, their spirits were still high, for
they were laughing and joking. One was limp-
ing along between two comrades who had band-
ages round their heads, and another, just able
to hobble, passed by all alone looking white
and sick.

It grew dark, yet we were still on the march.
And the rain was still coming do^vn, with the
wind whistling through it. The night grew
inky black, and I could scarcely see the lad who
marched shoulder to shoulder beside me.
What a night that was! But the swish of the
water and the roar of the wind were as nothing
io the noise of the big guns. There were shells
flying overhead, and, as they broke, they sent
a glare far up into the sky across the sheets of
rain, so that the big drops looked miles long.

We left the road again, and there's no tell-
ing how our officers managed to find our way in
all that blackness. Maybe they didn't find it.
They may have taken the wrong course for all
I know. But I know that, whether it was the
right way or the wrong one, it was a dreadful
course to follow. Over sticky furrows we

SINKING IN THE BOG 151

stumbled and fell, we slipped in wet grass, we
bumped into trees, and we went splashing into
pools of water to our waists.

Then a shell struck among us, and there came
cries and groans from wounded men and shouts
from the officers. But we could see not a thing
of what was going on. Not even the ground at
our feet could we see. Dark nights I have
known at the front, and many of them, but never
one so black as that. Even the light of the
lanterns spread only a few feet through the
storm.

A squad of about twenty of us got separated
from the column when the shell exploded. A
moment later the man who carried our lantern
fell into a hole of water, and the light went out
for good. We groped about, trying to find our
way back to the rest of the company. After a
while we stood still and listened. Wherever
the column was, we couldn't hear them, nor any
other sound but the storm and the guns.

Then we went into the mud — worse mud than
any we had pulled through since the rain began.
One moment we were sinking into it half way
to our knees and it was as much as we could
do to pull ourselves free; the next we were

152 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

splashing in pools of water, while the mud at the
bottom gripped our feet.

We floundered along, not knowing which way
to turn, and the bog grew worse and worse.
Once I went into the mire to my knees and
thought I was lost, for it took the last bit of
strength that was left me to get out.

There came a cry for help.

* * I 'm sinking ! I 'm sinking ! ' ' the voice cried.
^ ' The mud ^s sucking me dowai ! ' '

And then :

*'We can't help him. We're sinking our-
selves."

I felt the mud pulling me down, too. Not
another step could I take. All the time I was
struggling to get loose the voice of the fright-
ened lad, whoever he was, was crying for help
over and over again.

Then came a flash of light. It may have been
lightning, or it may have been a bursting shell
or a mine or a rocket. I was too busy trying to
save myself to know what it came from. All I
knew was that it lit up the whole bog with a
dazzling glare and that close in front of us a
lad had sunk into the mud to his shoulders and
was slowly going out of sight.

o

bJO

a

TFE rEY/ YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX
TILDEN fOUKDATlONS

SINKING IN THE BOG 153

For half a second we saw liim. His face
showed white as chalk, and his arms were reach-
ing out to us. Then the light went out.

For a few moments he kept calling to us.
Then we heard him no more. Another light
flashed, and in the spot where he had been there
was nothing but black mud. I began to shiver
and shake as the mud drew me down. It took
the heart out of me, that sight.

I cried out, for I thought the bog had got me
for good and all. An arm reached out from
behind and grabbed me, and with that help I
pulled myself free. The next step brought me
to firmer ground.

^^We'll all be done for if we don't get out of
here soon,'' said the lad who had helped me.
*^I was almost gone myself a minute ago, and
I'm that twisted I don't know which way to
turn. ' '

Close together we moved carefully along, and
soon we found easier going. Before long we
heard some one calling out, ^^This way, boys,"
and we followed the voice. After a few min-
utes we had reached grass-covered fields, and,
as a light flashed, we saw the road not a hundred
yards ahead.

CHAPTEE XXI

THE BATTLE OF FLANDERS

AS we were drawing away from the bog a
man edged np to me out of somewhere in
the blackness and kept by my side. I spoke,
but he said not a word. After a time, in one of
those flashes of light, I looked square into his
face. The sight of it turned me cold, for it
was Spike who was beside me.

I jumped away from him, and I am not sure
that I didn't cry out, for my nerves had gone
to pieces in the struggle in the mud. Even back
in that bog I should rather have been, taking
chances with being swallowed by it, than out
there in the open alone on such a night with that
blighter sneaking along beside me in the pitchy
dark. He could knife me or shoot me, and no-
body would ever be the wiser.

I made off from him as fast as I could, but
it seemed to me that all the time he was keep-
ing behind me. It may have been my shaky
nerves that made me think so, for when I got

154

THE BATTLE OF FLANDERS 155

to the road, where the lights of marching regi-
ments were flickering along the way, I was
alone.

As I sat resting by the roadside and trying to
scrape some of the thick cakes of mud from my
clothes and shoes a few lads came straggling out
of the fields and joined me. They were part
of our company and had been with me in the
bog. As shaky as I they were, and we were all
so tired out from what we had been through
that as we started off to try to find our place
in the column we slunk along as if our feet had
been weighted with lead.

*^I'd give all my back pay for a fag,'^ said
one of them, some lad I must have known,
though I couldn't recognize him in the dark.
^*My nerves are jumping something awful.
And not a smoke among us ! I lost my gun, and
nigh to lost my life along with it in that mud-
hole. Blimey! I wish this bloomin' night was
over. ' '

As fast as we could we marched along the
road, and not very far ahead we came up with
our battalion. The lads in our company didn't
even know we had been gone ; they didn 't know
anything but that the rain was soaking through

156 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

them and that their packs were growing heavier
with every step.

Before long we turned off the road again, and
we found a little farther on that they were send-
ing us into the trenches. They were more like
brooks than trenches. We waded through
them with the water up to our knees. Half
dead we were for want of sleep, but it was little
rest we got that night in all the wet.

It was there that We learned that our army
had been driving the Huns back for almost
a week, and that there was big fighting going
on over more than twenty miles of line. We
were on the edge of the great Battle of Flanders,
and Fritzie was getting his worst beating since
the Marne.

In the morning the storm let up, but it was a
dark, foggy day and our clothes were still sop-
ping wet. I could think of nothing but that I
wanted to go to sleep, and every time I sat down
my head began to nod. But there was no time
to doze. They were going to send us into the
fight, and we had to clean our guns and make
ready.

Before long our artillery got to work, and
made a terrible din. It was the biggest bom-

THE BATTLE OF FLANDERS 157

bardment I had ever heard, and our officers told
us that we were giving the Germans twice as
many shells as they were sending back. We
knew well what all the big gunfire meant. They
were getting the German trenches into shape for
us to break through. They were going to wipe
those trenches out if they could, so we could
meet Fritzie in the open.

In the afternoon, soaked and tired though we
were, we went over the top and at them. It was
mud, mud, mud everywhere, and it was all we
could do to get through it. We slipped, and fell,
and wallowed a bit and were up again, and the
mud was caked over us from head to toes as we
drove forward through the bullets and shells.

Ahead of us in the mist I saw a gray line of
men crouching out in the open with their bayo-
nets ready for us. We went into them full tilt,
and we found that they were lined up in front
o"f trenches that had been shot to pieces and
almost levelled by the big shells.

A Hun rose up out of a hole in front of me,
and the mud and water was dripping from him
as he jabbed at me with his bayonet. I caught
his gun against mine and turned it. And then
I got him in the stomach. He dropped back

158 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

into Ms hole, and I heard the mud splash as he
fell.

Near by some Boches were jumping into a
dug-out through a door in the top. We went
for them, and the door closed with a bang. "We
tried to break through, but the door was made of
steel and was fastened tight. The whole dug-
out was steel and concrete and had held fast
through all the shell-fire that had wiped out the
trench. If we had pried away at it all night
we wouldn't have made a dent.

A group of bombers came up and crouched
down beside the door to wait for it to open.

*^Fritzie'll 'ave to open up some time,'' said a
fat Tommy who held a bomb in his fist, ^'and
w'en 'e does we'll drop a few of these into
'im."

The Huns' line went all to pieces as we drove
into it, and in not much more than a minute
there were hundreds of Boches with their hands
in the air singing, ^ ^ Kamerad ! ' '

We went on to attack the second line, and
there, too, we found the trenches almost wiped
out and the Huns waiting for us in front of
them. They had had such an awful dose of
shell-fire that they didn 't put up much of a fight,

THE BATTLE OF FLANDERS 159

and the cold steel we gave them did the trick in
no time.

I came back with three prisoners who had
been turned over to me to take to the rear. As
we passed the concrete dug-out the bombers
were still crouching over the steel door waiting.
They were like cats watching a mouse-hole.

^'I^m tellin' yer it's only a question of time,"
said the fat Tommy. ^^Then they opens the
door and we drops the bombs.''

One of my prisoners was an officer, and he
was showing signs of getting balky. I tickled
him. with the point of my bayonet, and he gave
a yell and went ahead without any more trouble.
I drove the three of them along in front of me
through the mud, letting them know the bay-
onet wasn't keeping very far away from their
skins, and it was as easy as driving horses.
But I was a bit worried when I saw the fog
creeping in around us again, thinking that if it
got thick they might try to break away.

They must have been thinking the same
thing, for, when the fog did thicken up a bit, one
of them jumped into it and ran. I fired at him,
and I must have hit him somewhere, for I heard
him yell, but he kept on running. I couldn 't go

160 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

after him with the other two on my hands, and
before I could shoot again he was hidden in the
fog. But I was thankful he wasn't the officer.

The fighting was still going on all along the
line, but I didn't have any more of it that day.
After I delivered my prisoners I found a fairly
dry spot in our trench with nobody near, and I
curled up in it for a bit of rest. I was so fagged
I couldn't have kept going five minutes more,
and I had no more than touched the ground
when I dropped asleep.

A sergeant woke me up with a crack from the
butt of his gun on the soles of my feet. I must
have been sleeping there more than an hour, so
some of the lads told me. It did me good. I
felt fresh again and like going out and doing-
some more fighting.

When night came the big guns were still go-
ing, and we heard that some of our infantry
was attacking in the dark not far away.

Next morning we went to work digging
trenches where the shells had levelled those of
the Huns and filling sand bags for the parapets.
As it grew dark we were hurried up to the new
front and into a trench we had taken from the
Germans but which had been left in fairly good

THE BATTLE OF FLANDERS 161

shape. The Boches were getting ready to at-
tack, and we had small chance of sleep.

About two hours after dark their artillery
opened up strong, and a little later they came
at us.

We climbed up and met them in front of the
sand bags. "We put the bayonets to them, and
the punishment they got from us was more than
they could stand. Little by little we pushed
them back, and when their line broke we chased
them through the mud, stumbling over the dead
and wounded.

It was then that I saw Spike going forward a
few feet away from me, and I kept the tail of
an eye on him, knowing well that he hadn 't for-
gotten his grudge and that he was still waiting
for a chance to get even. A little later I caught
sight of Bonesey. Spike was just behind him,
keeping the same distance as they went forward,
and I knew it was no German he was after. He
was tracking Bonesey and waiting for his
chance, for he never let him get out of his sight.
I ran forward to give Bonesey a warning, but
I hadn't reached him when Spike raised his
gun and fired. Bonesey clapped a hand to his
cheek, where the bullet had cut a gash through

162 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

the skin, and at the same time a German in front
of him fell forward dead. He had been killed
by the same bullet.

Bonesey wheeled around, with his gun raised
ready to shoot, but Spike had made off into the
dark, and we didn^t see him again till the fight-
ing was over.

We might have complained to an officer of
what he had done, but what would we gain by it?
Spike could say he had shot at the German, and
we could never prove that he hadn't. And yet
we knew well that he would try the same trick
again sooner or later.

^'Some one of these nights, or some day in a
fog, ^e'll get one of us," Bonesey said, ^^ unless
we get 'im first. I'm goin' to shoot 'im in the
next fight, Mascot, providin' the chance comes
me way.''

But Spike's chance didn't come in Flanders,
though we fought there for a full week longer,
driving them back mile after mile, taking the
heart out of them till they wanted to fight no
more and wished they had never crossed the
Rhine.

CHAPTER XXII

VICTIMS OF THE HUNS

MANY a lad was missing from our com-
pany when we went on the march again.
Some were lying under the daisies in Flanders,
some were among the wounded in the hospitals,
and a few were in German prison camps, for the
Huns, even though we had given them a hard
beating, had managed to round up a few prison-
ers now and then.

We filed out one night from the trenches
where the big battle had been fought, and took
the road to the south. The dreadful rains were
over, the stars were all out, and we were a jolly
lot as we swung along, our packs on our backs,
singing and joking into France.

For the next few days we were on the go a
good part of the time, headed we didn't know
where but into another battle as likely as not.
We were going through a country the Germans
had just left, and the marks of the brutes were

163

164 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

everywhere — ^houses blown to pieces, churdiea
battered by shells, orchards chopped down,
crops ruined. But the people were the saddest
sight — the old men and women and children
who had lost their homes.

Toward the end of the first day we were
marching along in the dust under a scorching
hot sun, and our water bottles were empty.
We had come a long way through the heat and
our tongues were dry with thirst. We came to
a pool of water beside the road, and some of
the soldiers ran up and drank from it, though
the water was warm and muddy. More of us
were about to try it, but the officers stopped us.
They said the Germans had been there only a
short time before, and that they might have put
poison in the pool, that being a favourite trick
of theirs.

When the lads who had drunk the water heard
that they began to worry. And they had rea-
son to, for soon they all turned terribly sick and
one dropped dead in the road.

Our officers sent men back to warn the regi-
ments that were following us, and it was well
they did. When our men got to the pool the
Bedfordshires had just come up to it and some

VICTIMS OF THE HUNS 165

of them were on their knees beside it about to
drink when they got the warning.

When we turned into the fields beside the
road that evening to spend the night I caught
sight of the fat bomber who had been squatting
over the steel door of the dug-out where the
Germans were trapped in the battle of Flanders.
He was lying on the grass now smoking a ciga-
rette, and I went up to him and asked him what
had happened to those Huns.

*^We waited a full hour for them/^ he said,
^^and then they lifted the bloomin' door a bit
and we dropped the presents we *ad for them
through the crack. There may be bits of Ger-
mans lyin* round there yet. There was about
thirty of 'em, I should judge, though some of
'em were in so many pieces that me 'ead is ach-
in ' yet from the job of tryin ' to count 'em. ' '

The bomber and I slept side by side that
night, and before morning I was sorry I hadn't
chosen some other spot, for he had a way of
waking up from time to time and poking me
with his foot to get me to listen to something
he had done in the line of blowing Huns to
pieces. I never took a fancy to those bombers.
They were good lads to keep away from, for

166 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

there was never any telling wlietlier tliey had
the stuff hidden about themselves somewhere,
and it went ofP by accident sometimes.

When we got to La Bassee the big church
there was full of wounded soldiers. It was in
that church that we saw something that turned
me cold — the most dreadful sight of all the aw-
ful things we had seen. One of the nurses in
charge of the wounded was a sister of mercy
who came forward to welcome us. An officer
held out his hand to her, but she drew back from
him and shook her head. Then she lifted her
arms for him to see. Both hands had been cut
off by the Huns. As I stared at her I thought
of what the Fusilier had told us when we came
to Ypres of what devils the German soldiers
were, and I knew then that he had been right
when he said it was doing the Lord's work to
kill them.

It was like a dreadful dream, that long march
of ours from village to village, for every day,
almost every hour, we came to some new sight
that saddened us or sent our blood running cold.
We had thought in Flanders that we had seen
all the terrible things that a man could ever
lay eyes on, but what we saw as we went through

VICTIMS OF THE HUNS 167

France was worse than those battlefields full
of dead men. I want to forget most of it. I
don't want it to come back and haunt me. I
don't want it to come to me in my dreams or
when I am alone in the dark.

One morning as we were resting beside the
road a pretty girl not more than eighteen years
old came running up to us and just as she
reached us fell forward into the dust in a faint.
Some cold water was thrown over her face, and
before long her strength came back and she
told her story.

She and a young man had been taken prison-
ers by the Germans, who had locked them up in
a house, meaning to send them back behind their
lines later. Some German soldiers were there
with them, and a guard was pacing back and
forth outside. The soldiers found mne in the
cellar, and before long were very drunk. They
began to threaten the two prisoners with their
bayonets. After a time the soldiers fell asleep,
and the girl and the young man crept to a win-
dow and softly opened it. They saw the guard
still pacing back and forth. The young man got
a knot of firewood, and, holding it ready to strike,
waited for him to get to the window. As the

168 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

guard passed it the young man struck him on the
head with the knot of wood and knocked him
senseless. Then he and the girl climbed out
and ran off through the fields. The girl lost
him somewhere in the dark, and ran on alone.
At last, miles away from where she had escaped,
she caught sight of us beside the road and knew
she was saved.

She drew two pieces of bread from her dress,
and told us they were all that she had left to
keep her from starving. Her home was gone,
her parents had been killed by the shell that
destroyed it, and she had nothing in the world
but the clothes she wore and those two pieces of
bread.

Our Captain gave her a little money and sent
her down the line to be turned over to the care
of the Royal Garrison Artillery.

A little later we came to a farm-house full
of old men, women and children whose homes
had been destroyed. A very old man with a
white beard owned the farm-house, and had
lived there alone. Then the Germans came
and destroyed almost all the houses in the neigh-
bourhood. Whenever the old man heard of a
homeless family he sent for them and took them

VICTIMS OF THE HUNS 169

in under his roof, until now almost all Ms neigh-
bours were there. It was a big house, and he
had enough wine and wheat cakes to keep them
all from starving for a time.

When the Germans came the old man was
away on a visit to Amiens. On his return he
found that his daughter and his grandchildren
had been killed by the soldiers, and he was all
alone in the world. Then he made a vow that
all the rest of his life he would help his home-
less neighbours, and that his home should al-
ways be theirs until they could build new homes
of their own.

Glad I was when at last we heard the big
shells screeching over our heads again. We
could forget then all that we had seen and
heard on the march through the land of tears.
That is what I had heard one of our officers call
it — the land of tears. And I know he was right.

We had no more than heard our first shell
when along came that funeral-faced Welshman
We had known at Ypres, and I knew there was
trouble in the wind. What he was doing down
there I don^t know to this day, for there wasn't
a sign of his regiment, but there he was all alone
and as gloomy as ever.

170 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

*^Hey, there, 'Ard Luck!^' Bonesey sung out.
''You forgot something. 'Ow is it yer wasn't
predictin ' that rain and mud and fightin ' we got
into down by the Kiver Lys 1 ' '

Old Hard Luck stopped for half a minute, and
called after us as we passed him.

''Now, I'm tellin' you,'' he said, "there's
goin' to be trouble down where you're goin'."

That was all we heard, and we had to wait till
we got there to find out what the trouble was
to be.

CHAPTEE XXIII

AN ENEMY LEAVES US

LOUDEE, and louder the big guns spoke as
we moved on into the South, and we
thought the Boches must have made up their
minds to get even for the beating we had given
tliem in Flanders. We passed regiments that
had just come out of battle and they told us
Fritzie was as busy as a bee all along the front
as far as Arras. Now and then on the road
we got a bad dose of his shell-fire, so we knew
we must be marching along the edge of his main
line and that at any hour he might move for-
ward and attack us or that we might be sent in
after him.

At one spot the shells were falling in the road,
and we had to move out through the fields. It
was while we were crossing those farms that
the Boche artillery got the range on us and
killed some of our men.

Then a shell struck a few steps away from
me and burrowed into the ground under my

171

172 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

feet. The explosion sent me np into the air,
and when I fell the flying earth came down and
buried me deep. Some of the lads set to work
with shovels trying to dig me out, and if they
hadn't worked fast I should have been done for.
They dug down till they came to one of my feet,
and they pulled me out by the leg. I was half
dead, and it took some time to bring me back
to life, but they doctored me up and I was as
sound as ever. I hadn't got a scratch.

*'You weren't made to get killed. Mascot,"
said Billy. *^If the Boches had a bullet with
your number you 'd have got it by this time, wdth
all the fighting youVe been through, and it's
the same way with me. There's no bullets with
our numbers, Mascot, and we'll both pull
through this bloomin' war alive."

I began to think the same thing myself after
all the close squeezes I had had. Many a lad
in our company had got the idea in his head that
he couldn't be killed because he had come
through so much fighting without a scratch.
But I wasn't so sure myself. I had known a
chap who had been in the war ever since the
Battle of the Marne, and because he had been
lucky he, too, had got the notion that there was

AN ENEMY LEAVES US 173

no bullet with his number. The idea made him
brave and reckless, and he took all kinds of
chances. But there was a bullet with his num-
ber after all, and it got him at last in the Bat-
tle of Flanders.

Soon we got into the fighting again, but it
wasn't in the trenches this time. We found
the Boches in a village, where, as they lay hid-
den in the cellars of ruined houses, they fired at
us with machine guns. Our artillery opened
up on them, and then we went in with the bayo-
nets. They raked the streets with their ma-
chine gun fire, and we had to shelter ourselves
behind the broken walls of the buildings. Then
we would run out when the firing died down,
and charge them. We cleaned them out of one
cellar after another. It was like fighting rats in
a pit, and it was just like rats that they squealed
when they found the British terriers jumping
in on top of them and giving them the cold steel.

There was one cellar on top of a little rise in ^
the ground where the Boches gave us the hard-
est work of all. They had several machine
guns with them and they were behind broken
stone walls that were a foot thick. Two or
three times they drove us back, and it looked as

174 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

if we should have to lose many men before get-
ting them. Our officers called us off after a
time.

<<I^ni goin' to get those blighters meself/' I
heard the fat bomber say. He had a talk with
our Captain, and then disappeared. The next
time I saw him he was crawling along on his
stomach behind some piles of broken stones.
From there he crept into a patch of long grass
on the slope leading up to the cellar where the
Boches lay. A few minutes later he ran for-
ward, right in front of the muzzles of their
guns. It was the bravest deed I had ever seen.
In a moment he was up on the cellar wall.

Then there came a crash, followed by another
almost in the same second. A cloud of smoke
and dirt rose up, and we gave a yell and charged.
There wasn't a man left to meet us — only the
dead and wounded — but just outside the wall we
found the fat bomber crouching low and nurs-
ing an ugly cut in his forehead.

There was still some fighting going on in
other parts of the village, but it didn't last long.
We passed big groups of Hun prisoners, and
more were running in all the time with their
hands raised and calling, ''Kamerad!"

AN ENEMY LEAVES US 175

Then we began the search for our dead and
wounded, and there were many of them, for the
machine guns had been pouring a dreadful fire
into us.

It was then, as I was helping in the search,
that I found, lying beside a cellar wall, a lad
whose face I thought I knew, though it was
covered with blood and dirt. He was still alive
and just able to call out feebly for help, but he
was going fast.

^^Blimey!'' he whispered as I bent over him.
^*So it's you, ye little devil!''

Then I knew him. It was Spike.

** 'Old me up, ma tie," he pleaded in a voice
so weak I could hardly hear him. ^ ^ I knows I 'm
goin', for it's gettin' dark."

The sun was shining down on us, but I knew
the light was going out for him for good and all.

^^I 'opes the Lord may forgive me for the
black deeds I've done," he mumbled. ^^Take
me 'and, matie, and say there's no 'ard feelin's
before I goes."

So I took his hand, and the next moment his
eyes closed and I heard a rattle in his throat.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE

VERY often in the trenches or on the march
I thought of the far-away ^* Treasure Is-
land ^ ' nights in my room at home, and I would
say to myself, ^* Tommy, you never expected
then that some day you 'd be going Jim Hawkins
one better, did you now?''

I bring in Jim Hawkins again because I am
drawing near to an adventure that has reminded
me ever since of the liveliest part of that boy's
story, the pirates' attack on the block-house.
Many times at home I had dreamed about that
block-house fight, and of course in the dream
I wasn't Tommy Kehoe but the Hawkins boy.
Dreams like that don't come true once in a
million times, but mine did. Only in my case
the heroes were outside and the villains within.
But our block-house fight made the crowd on
Treasure Island seem like blooming sw^abs.

We were marching cheerily along toward

176

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 177

Arras, and must have been about six miles from
the town. It was four o 'clock of a warm, sunny
afternoon. Our throats were dry and our
stomachs empty, but our hearts were light
enough, for we were looking forward to bully-
beef, biscuits and tea, and perhaps a fine, hot
stew at the end of the day's march, and a good
sleep beside the road. Some of the lads were
singing, and Billy Matchett and I were talking
of what we might expect in the way of fighting
at Arras.

In front of us between bare fields lay a long
stretch of white road. Way off near the sky
line stood a gloomy-looking stone house. As we
came nearer we saw that the windows were all
smashed, and the roof torn by shells. There
wasn't a sign of life about it, and I thought that
whoever had lived there must have deserted it
long ago.

I can't say what it was about that dismal
house that aroused my curiosity, for we had
passed many a building that had been battered
by shells, but for some reason I couldn't keep
my eyes from it. There was something un-
canny about the place, and I've learned that
often when things are wrong while seeming to be

178 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

all right there's something he can't explain
inside a man that tells him so.

We were within perhaps a hundred yards of
the house when I thought I saw a man's head
appear in one of the broken windows. The
next moment came the dreadful click-click-click-
click that we all had heard so often. Machine
guns! They were being fired from those win-
dows.

^^Typewriters!" cried Billy, his eyes grow-
ing big.

The same instant a man right in front of him
fell forward and lay still. I saw two more
drop before we could fall into position.

In less than a minute we were lined up along
the road, the front line lying flat on their stom-
achs, the line behind them on their knees and
the men in the rear standing up, and then our
bullets began to patter against the walls of
the house like a hailstorm. But those Germans
were very well protected and had had plenty of
time to make all their arrangements for de-
fending themselves before opening fire on us.

More of our men fell. It didn 't look as if we
could stay there much longer without being
badly shot up. But there was no cover in

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 179

sight. We might have fallen back out of range
and waited for the artillery to come up, but I
suppose our officers wouldn't have cared to
have the house shelled. Of course, as always,
they must have wanted to take some prisoners.
Prisoners are valuable because often the offi-
cers can squeeze useful information out of
them. There wouldn't have been any live pris-
oners left if the artillery had got to work.
And, besides, the artillery might be hours away
for all we knew.

The men spread out all around the house, and
Fritzie didn't find us so easy to hit after that.
We kept on pumping shot at them, hoping to
throw such a hot fire through the windows
that the machine gunners would have to go out
of business. I think we did put one or two of
their guns out of action, but at least one was still
going and now and then one of our men would
fall.

The fight had been going on quite a time when
one of our officers, who had been skirmishing
about through the fields, came back with the
news that he had found a big log, and some
of the men went with him to get it. They came
back in a few minutes lugging it along with

180 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

them. It was the trunk of a tree, fifteen or
twenty feet long and at least a foot thick.

Eight away we saw what was in the wind.
That log was going to be used as a battering
ram.

A squad of men got hold of it and went charg-
ing down the road as fast as they could go,
yelling like savages. In front of them, with
a good grip on the end of the log, was old Bone-
sey, the ex-burglar, on the way to the best bit
of housebreaking he had ever done in his life,
while Martin, the Scotland Yard man, was run-
ning along behind keeping an eye on him.

All of us who were still on that side of the
house went tearing after them. The machine
gun bullets were spattering all around us in
the dust, but we didn't care. It was a brand-
new kind of an adventure, and we were wild to
get into it. On the march my feet had dragged
as if they had been weighted down with lead,
but I had forgotten all about being tired and
raced along like a two-year-old just out of the
paddock. Fighting in the trenches was about
as exciting as a prayer meeting compared to
this.

Old Bonesey and the rest of the crowd with

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 181

the ram were making a bee line for the front
door of the house. One of them dropped dead
when they were within thirty yards of it, but
the rest kept on without so much as hesitating
and came up against the door at full speed.
The big log struck it square in the centre.
There was a tremendous crash, and the whole
door flew into pieces.

Half a dozen men dove through the broken
door before the splinters had stopped flying.
By the time I got there the ground floor was so
jammed with Huns and Tommies that there
wasn^t room to swing a gun.

I think the first men to rush in must have
killed or wounded a good many of the Germans,
but there were still plenty of them to be ac-
counted for. It was the liveliest hand-to-hand
fighting I had ever seen. There was scarcely
room for bayonet work or even for shooting,
though now and then a gun would go off. Our
men were using their knives and their fists.
The yells and groans and occasional shots made
a terrible noise.

It wasn't the sort of a mess for me to be
getting into, for I was altogether too small for
such close hand-to-hand work as that and I

182 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

couldn't see a Fritzie in the lot who didn't stand
head and shoulders above me. I had more than
one chance to knife one of them in the back, but
doing that is too much like Fritzie 's own style
of fighting.

I say there wasn't room to swing a gun, but
there was one exception. In a corner of the
room stood a big Prussian who was using the
butt of his gun as a club, and nobody could get
near him. He could have been shot, of course,
but either nobody cared to fire at him or nobody
thought of it. I think it must have been the fun
of a hand-to-hand fight with him that kept them
from shooting. His gun was swinging like the
sail of a windmill in a gale, and a Tommy with
his knife in his hand who tried to crawl under
it was knocked flat.

At this the big Hun gave a roar like a lion
and began to bellow names at us. He called
us pigs, and probably a good many worse things,
too, but it didn't hurt our feelings much since
we couldn't understand more than one word in
ten.

' ' Put the steel to 'im ! Put the steel to 'im ! ' '

The whole roomful of us was yelling and
pushing and struggling to get near.

THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX
TILDE^i fOUKDATlCNS

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 183

A moment later one of our lads jabbed at
him with a bayonet, but Fritzie parried it and
sent the Tommy ^s gun flying against the wall.
It must have been two or three minutes that
he held everybody off. Then a Tommy made a
spring for him, as quick as a cat, and drove a
knife into him. Fritzie 's gun dropped with a
crash to the floor, and he fell on top of it.

The big room in which all this fighting took
place covered almost all the ground floor, but
there was a little adjoining room, and I saw
somxC of the Tommies standing at the door and
looking into it. I squeezed in among them, and
there before us lay a man, a woman and a baby
stone dead. They had been stabbed with bayo-
nets. I never felt so much like fighting as
when I saw that little baby lying there. Old
Bonesey was in the group at the door, and,
though he as well as all of us had seen many
dreadful things before that day, there were
big tears running down his face. He wasn^t a
bad sort of a burglar after all, poor old Bone-
sey.

By that time the fighting on that floor was
over. There wasn't a live German left on it
who wasn't wounded, but several had jumped

184 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

through the windows and had been captured by
men watching outside. But there was a stair-
case running down along the wall of the big
room, and two men among several who had tried
to climb it had been shot down by Germans who
were lying flat on the upper landing.

A dozen Tommies made a rush for the stairs,
but the Germans, lying well sheltered on the
floor at the top, shot dowTi into the thick of the
crowd, hitting three or four, and sending the
rest back to cover. It began to look as if four
or five Fritzies could hold those stairs against
a regiment.

For a moment after that last rush for the
stairs all the noise died down, and we heard
from the floor above a sound that made us all
stand still and listen. It was a queer, whimper-
ing cry. We knew no man would cry like that.
It might have been a woman, but it sounded
more like a child.

* * The devils ! ' ' snarled a man in front of me
under his breath, and sprang for the stairs.
Just in time somebody pulled him back. It
would have been sure death for him if he had
gone a few steps more.

It was Bonesey who showed us how to do it.

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 185

Housebreaking was just in his line, and he knew
exactly how to go about the work that lay before
us. He whispered a few words to a sergeant,
and then rushed outdoors. Most of us followed
him.

^'Keep your bloomin' mouths shut!" warned
the Sergeant as we went out.

We followed Bonesey around to the rear of
the house. There we saw him climbing to the
shoulders of a Tommy, who stood against the
pillar of a porch, whose roof jutted out from
under the second-story windows. He went up
to the roof like a monkey, with the rest of us
after him as fast as we could get there. Then
we made a rush for the windows. With the
points of their bayonets the men in front drove
the Germans back and jumped into the house.

I got there just behind the first rush, and the
way our men were cleaning out those Germans
was a sight a man isn't likely to set eyes on
once in a lifetime unless he 's born lucky.

Eight in the centre of the big room — there was
only one room on that floor — a Tommy had
gripped a Hun by the throat and was stran-
gling the life out of him. Another Fritzie
knocked me flat as he fell over me with a knife

186 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

thrust clear through him. Our men hadn 't for-
gotten what they had seen in the little room
downstairs, and they were not taking any more
prisoners. They were not letting any more go
wounded, either. They meant quick death for
every Hun in sight, and that place was a slaugh-
ter house for a few minutes.

Then came a rush of feet on the stairs. The
Tommies below had been listening to the fight-
ing, and hadn't been able to hold themselves
back any longer. Two or three shots rang out
as the Germans on the landing fired down into
them, but it would have taken artillery to have
stopped that maddened crowd. They drove the
Germans at the top back into the room and came
piling in after them.

Suddenly, as all that mass of fighting men
drove in on us, came a frightful crash. The
whole house seemed to be going to pieces. The
shell-torn roof had fallen in on us, and we were
half buried in the ruins. The air was so full
of fl^^ing dust and splinters and plaster that we
could scarcely see.

The falling timbers had knocked me off my
feet. I picked myself up, sound enough except
for a few bruises, and looked around me, won-

FIGHT IN THE STONE HOUSE 187

dering whether anybody but myself had been
left alive in all that wreckage. Then I saw
Tommies everywhere rubbing the dust and
plaster out of their eyes, and most of them un-
hurt, though one had been killed by a falling
beam and several were badly cut and bruised.
The strangest sight of all was a Tommy crawl-
ing about with a knife in his hand making sure
no Germans were left alive under the rubbish.

Dead Germans were everywhere in the ruin,
and the walls were covered with blood. As I
stood there half dazed I thought of the whimper-
ing cry we had heard when in the room below,
and wondered what it could have been. For a
moment I could see nothing but the Tommies
and the dead Germans. Then, in a dark corner,
I saw two girls cowering close together on the
floor. One looked to be not more than fourteen
years old and the other a year or two younger.
They looked as if they were ready to faint with
fright, and there was a half -mad stare in their
big, dark eyes. All the bloody work that had
been done in that room as they crouched there
must have seemed like a terrible dream to them.

We got them out of that awful place as soon
as we could. Out in the fields, in the bright sun-

188 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

shine, a little colour came back into their cheeks,
and after a little time they became less fright-
ened and were able to talk with ns.

They told us that just before we had appeared
on the road the Germans had killed their father,
mother and baby sister. The Germans had been
drinking, and acted like madmen. They began
to break open wine casks in the cellar, and be-
came worse than ever. Then they dragged the
two little girls to the floor above. We had come
in sight just in time to save them.

A little later the London Scottish Eegiment
came in sight, and we turned the little girls over
to them. Then we marched on.

CHAPTEE XXV

BACK in the time when I read creepy stor-
ies at home and dreamed abont them af-
terward in the night it seemed strange to wake
up and find myself in my quiet room, with the
sun shining in at the window, so soon after be-
ing on some wild island or hiding aboard ship
from mxutineers. Blind Pew would be gripping
my arm or Long John Silver holding a gun at
my head, then quick as a flash they would fade
away — and there I would be, in bed, looking
out through the window at the roofs.

It was the same sort of a feeling I had as we
marched away from that stone house while the
sun was shining on the fields and the birds were
singing all around us and everything was so
quiet and peaceful. It seemed as if I must have
dreamed the dreadful things that had been
happening only a few minutes before. I turned
my head for a last look at the place, half think-
ing it might have faded away, as those dreams

189

190 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

had done back home. But there it was against
the sky, the gloomiest, creepiest-looking house
I should ever care to see. It seemed then more
dreadful than before, with its broken roof and
its dark empty windows, for I knew there was
blood trickling down its stairs and that there
were dead men lying on the floors.

Out between those fields the war seemed very
far away, for there wasn't a sound but the birds
and the voices of the soldiers. Our wagons,
which sometimes made such a rumbling and
rattling, were way off to the rear. Almost al-
ways there had been the sound of distant firing,
but now we heard not a gun.

<< 'Twould be nice, to my way of thinkin', if
we should find the bloomin' Avar hall over, and
'ear they was sendin' us back to Blighty," said
Bonesey, who was marching beside me. ^'I'm
tired of the fightin', Mascot. I want to get
back to Blighty, and 'ear the noises in the
streets, and see the people goin' by, and drop
in at a pub for a swig o' beer. 'Alf dead I am
for a glass o' good oP Lunnon beer down me
throat."

^'It's my morning tub I'm dying for," put
in Billy. ^^I haven't had a bath in a week,

AN OLD PAL ^^GOES WEST'^ 191

and there's the blood of one of those bloomin'
Huns back there on my hands this minute. Per-
haps we'll come to a brook soon."

*'Yer must 'ave some fish blood in yer,"
Bonesey grumbled. ^^ Never 'ave I 'eard of a
bloke so fond of sousin' 'imself in water."

**Give us a song, Billy," I said, **and you'll
forget about the morning tub."

So he gave us some old-timers, *^Silk Hat
Tony," ^'The Lights o' London" and ''The
Girl from Dundee." Soon there was singing
all along the road — nice, peaceful songs, with
no fighting or trouble in them — as if we hadn't
been putting the bayonets to a houseful of Huns
only a little time before and losing some of our
own lads while we were doing it.

Our kitchen wagons came up a little later and
gave us our supper beside the road, and we spent
the night there, getting a fine long sleep in the
dry grass, with the stars blinking dowm at us.,

When we woke up in the morning we heard
the guns going to the south of us, and we knew
it might be many a night before we should get
the chance of another such rest.

''Funny 'ow I keeps thinkin' of Blighty, Mas-
cot," said Bonesey, as we rolled up our blankets.

192 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

^*I wants to get out o' the tiglitin' and go back
there w'ere it's peaceful. I 'ad a bad dream
last night, and something's goin' to 'appen to
me if I don't."

But the big guns were calling us again, and
there wasn't a chance of going back to Blighty
yet unless we got hit.

^' 'Ear them guns," Bonesey grumbled.
**Hits always them guns, sayin' ^ 'Urry up' to
us poor blokes. And we'll 'urry up once too
often and 'go west,' where there's many a good
lad gone before us who's lyin' under the daisies
now. ' '

We got to the edge of Arras that morning, and
the Boches were waiting for us in houses and
cellars and behind piles of broken stones. Our
artillery was playing on them, but it didn't seem
to do much good. We infantry lads were the
ones for that kind of work. The big guns might
have pounded away there for a month with-
out cleaning the Huns out from such hiding
places.

So in we went, and it was ticklish work and
not to my liking, for we could never tell when
a typewriter was going to shoot at us from a
house or a cellar. Even raiding a trench back

AN OLD PAL '^GOES WEST" 193

in Flanders, though, so help me ! that was bad
enough, seemed better than this fighting in the
streets. We knew what to expect and what we
had to do when we went over the top and across
No Man's Land, but here we didn't know what
kind of trouble might be waiting for us.

Not so much as the shadow of a German did
we see as we came to the streets, and the place
was as quiet as a graveyard. A hungry-looking
cat crept across the way in front of us and was
the only living thing in sight.

Oh, what a place it was! Grass and weeds
growing in the wide cracks of the cobble-stone
paving, heaps of bricks and stones where houses
had stood, rows of houses still standing, but
roofless and with only ugly holes where the mn-
dows had been.

I jumped when I heard the rattle of a machine
gun, it came so suddenly out of the quiet. All
at once the guns began to play on us from at
least half a dozen places.

In our first rush we took some cellars from
which the Germans had been shooting at us.
They kept their guns going till our front line
was almost on top of them, and then threw up
their hands, yelling ' ' Kamerad ! ' ' But our lads

194 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

didn^t think tliey had surrendered soon enough,
and they gave some of them the bayonets by way
of a lesson. Fritzie had a nasty way of keeping
his gun going till the last second and then rais-
ing that ^'Kamerad^' cry, just as if he hadn't
been shooting our men down as long as he could
after he knew his game was up.

There came firing from some half -destroyed
houses farther on, and we knew the hardest
work was yet to be done, for the Bodies were
protected by stone walls and there was any
number of hiding places for their snipers. It
was a matter of crawling along in the shelter
of walls and rubbish heaps till we could get
near them.

About twenty of us were working our way
through a narrow lane when a bullet hit the
ground a couple of yards in front of me. It
had come from a little cottage a few yards
ahead. We fired at the windows, and then we
made a rush at the place and broke the door
down. As it fell in a machine gun began to
bark in another house near by, and, huddled all
together as we were, we were a fine target.
Before we could all dive in through the broken
door the gun got two of our party and bored

AN OLD PAL ^'GOES WEST'' 195

a hole through the helmet of a third without
hurting him.

Inside a dead German lay on the floor, but,
except for him, the house seemed to have been
deserted. A corporal bent over the dead man
and felt of him.

*^He's stone cold,'' he said. ^'And what's
more there's no gun beside him. So where 's
the bloke that shot at us? He can't have gone
out through the back, for our men have been
coming up on that side."

"We had a bomber with us, and he went nos-
ing about to see if there were any place where
he should drop the stuff he carried. The upper
story had been blown off by shells, so there was
only the floor we were on and the cellar where
any one might be hiding. We poked about be-
hind piles of rubbish and into what was left of
a closet, and looked into a broken chimney-hole,
but we found nobody.

^*We might take a look in the cellar," I said
to the Corporal.

**And get our heads blown off like as not,"
he answered. * * We '11 let the lad with the bombs
attend to the cellar. Clear out through the back
while he does the trick. ' '

196 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

We went out through the windows into a lit-
tle walled court, and watched the bomber creep
up to the door over the cellar stairs. He lifted
the door a foot or two, dropped in a bomb and
made a dive for a window. The explosion shook
the walls, and sent the door flying into splinters.

When the smoke had cleared away the bomber
went back to the stairs, and we followed him
down below into the dark.

^^Why, here's a rum go,'' the bomber said
as the Corporal struck a light. *^ There's two
cellars here, with a thick wall between 'em."

A heavy, iron-braced door in the wall had
been burst open by the explosion and the bomber
was stepping up to it when four men rushed out
on us. The Corporal's light went out, and we
were there in the dark, not knowing who was
friend and who was Hun.

I remember a shiver ran through me after
the light went out, for it was a dreadful thing to
be penned up in a black hole with enemies that
couldn't be seen and with the thought that any
moment one of them might run a bayonet
through me without my having a chance of dodg-
ing or parrjdng it. At the same time I heard
a scuffle, then a groan and the thud of a body

AN OLD PAL ^^GOES WEST'^ 197

falling on the dirt floor, though there was no
telling whether it was a Hun or one of our own
lads who had dropped.

It was then that the Corporal did a brave
thing, which no man careful of his life would
have risked in such a situation. He struck
another light.

The same instant a gun went off, and the
Corporal, with a cry, let the match drop, for
the bullet had hit him somewhere. But the
light had done its good work, for in the second
that it flared we got sight of the four Boches,
one of them dead or wounded, and we made for
the three that were up and ready for us. When
somebody struck another light they had been
done for. We hadn't lost a man, though the
Corporal was holding up a wounded hand which
the bullet had struck.

Up from that musty black hole we climbed,
without stopping to waste useful time in bury-
ing the bodies or dragging them along with us,
and it was as good as a drink to a dying man
to be in the light of day again, knowing which
way to turn, and where to strike when the next
shot came.

Tommies were running by in front, so, think-

198 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

ing the machine gun that had fired on us as we
broke through the door must have been silenced
by then, we went out and joined them.

At the end of the lane a wounded man — one
of our own lads — ^was dragging himself on his
hands and knees from the doorw^ay of what was
left of a house. Such a common sight were
wounded men that I scarcely noticed him at
first, but, as we drew nearer, I took another look,
and for a moment my heart stopped beating.

^^It's poor old Bonesey,'' said the Corporal.

Yes, it was poor old Bonesey ; and badly hurt,
for he was hardly able to move. As we gatli-
ered round him he took no notice of us, and then
I saw that a bullet had stnick him near the eyes
and that he was stone blind.

^'It^s the Mascot, old pal,'' I said as I bent
over him. * ' We 're going to take you along with
us."

**No use of that, little man," he answered,
*^for I'm goin' fast, and ye 'ad best let me die
'ere as elsewhere. Gimme a drink of water,
Matie; just enough to moisten me pipes, for I'm
bumin' up."

Though it was against orders to give water
to a wounded man, I let a few drops from my

AN OLD PAL ^'GOES WEST" 199

bottle trickle into his mouth — hardly enough to
swallow — and it seemed to do him a lot of good.

'^Many a time me old mother 'as told me I'd
be shot sooner or later sneakin' into somebody's
'ouse," he said. ^^And 'ere it's come true —
way down 'ere in France. But there's no job
for Scotland Yard in it."

A spell of coughing stopped him and seemed
to shake out of him all the little strength he had
left, but he found his voice again after a mo-
ment.

^^ There's the address of the girl back 'ome
that I've told yer about in me pay-book, lad.
Send 'er a line sayin' I was a good soldier and
died servin' me country, will yer?"

Then he went west, where the good soldiers
go, and I had lost as fine a friend as a lad ever
had.

CHAPTER XXVI

INTO THE TEENCHES AGAIN

LITTLE time there was to mourn for my
old pal, for our men were moving on,
cleaning out the Boche nests in front of us,
while the stretcher-bearers were hard at work
picking up the wounded and the dead.

We pressed on, with the Germans running
and scattering before- us, and my fighting blood
was up as we picked them off when they showed
in the open. One of them I got, by way of help-
ing to square accounts for what they had done
to Bonesey, though how is the death of a Hun,
or of many of them, to balance against the loss
of a good English soldier?

All the rest of that day we were fighting, and
all of the next, till there wasn't a fighting Ger-
man left. Then we had a little rest and quiet,
and we made ourselves comfortable in the
houses that were still standing.

Four days later, when we were beginning to
feel at home, the German artillery shelled us

200

INTO THE TRENCHES AGAIN 201

and drove us out. Then their infantry swarmed
in and took our places. But we didn't leave
them long in comfort. As we had done before,
we drove them before us from house to house
and from cellar to cellar. Day after day we
fought there, and when we were through we had
five hundred Grerman prisoners, to say nothing
of all their dead and wounded. Their dead lay
everywhere, in streets and houses and cellars
and yards, and it w^as a long job getting rid of
them.

We turned our prisoners over to the Bedford-
shires, and marched away, for we had all we
could stand of fighting for a w^hile. For five
days we rested in a big field. I slept in a hay-
stack, and it was the finest bed I had had since
leaving England.

Oh, those were days to remember! We had
better meals than we had ever had before, and
we dug potatoes, and boiled them in their
jackets. We found a brook, where we bathed,
and Billy grew cheerful again. We raked the
cooties from our shirts, and washed our clothes
and hung them up to dry. We got our hair
cut, for it had grown so long that we looked like
savages, and soon we made such a fine show-

202 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

ing that nobody would have thought of calling
us "the Scruffy Fifth.'' In the evenings we
had concerts, and some of the lads gave a play.
We could hear heavy firing miles away to re-
mind us that the war was still going on, but
no shells came our way, and our troubles were
over for a time.

" 'Ow would a chicken dinner appear to yer,
Mascot f said Piccadilly one morning. "I got
me blinkers on a fine fat rooster a while back
about a mile from 'ere, and I'm thinkin' 'e's
better in our stomachs than roamin' loose.
'Elp me catch the blighter and I'll give yer
'alf of 'im."

We found the rooster sitting on a fence,
watching us out of the corners of his eyes, and
he was such a fine fat bird it made me hungry to
look at him.

"I'll cluck at 'im," Piccadilly said, "and 'e
may come. 'E looks like a sociable bloke."

Piccadilly clucked, but the rooster just sat
there blinking at us.

" 'E don't hunderstand English," said Pic-
cadilly. "A little talkin' of French at 'im and
'e'd come."

He tried the few French words he knew, but

INTO THE TRENCHES AGAIN 203

the rooster didn't move, and at last Piccadilly
made a jump for him. The rooster flew off
the fence and made off through the fields, with
us after him. A lively runner that bird was,
and we must have chased him for a mile. Then
Piccadilly got him by the leg, and we made off
with him.

That evening I gave a bit of my share to
Billy, and it seemed like the best meal we had
ever had in our lives. After that we kept our
eyes out for chickens, but we never found an-
other.

Sunday came while we were there in the
field, and we had our first church service in
months. It was a fine sight, all those Tommies
on their knees out there in the open, thanking
the Lord for bringing them through the fight-
ing alive, though it was little we knew whether
the next week might not be our last.

It was to be the last for some of us, as it
turned out, for the next day we made a ten-
mile march and went into the trenches and the
fighting.

These trenches had been lined with cement by
the Germans and were the finest we had ever
seen; yet we didn't fare so well in them as we

204 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

had done in Flanders, except that there was no
mud to speak of. They were just as full of
rats, bigger rats than those at Ypres and a good
deal more dangerous, for they were the biting
kind. After we heard that they had nipped the
throats of four men, who had died from the
poison of the bites, we feared the things far
more than we did the Germans.

A queer lad we met out there in front of
Arras. He was the son of a rich baronet, and
had been driving ^ ^ shakers, ' ' which is the name
we had for motor cars. He was such a wild
driver that he had put more than thirty of them
out of business, he told us, but had come through
every accident without a scratch. So unlucky
he had been with the *' shakers ^^ that they had
made him a stretcher-bearer, which is no less
dangerous a job.

^^I've been in the war ever since it began,'' he
said, ''and all those three years I've been trying
to get a wound so I could get back to Blighty.
But I've been unlucky. No matter how hard
I try to get hit, there's no bullet with my num-
ber. A hundred times I've been out between
the lines with the bullets flying all around me,

INTO THE TRENCHES AGAIN 205

yet here I am with nothing to show for it and
getting more homesick all the time.''

One evening our Captain told us that at
twelve o'clock that night we were going over
the top. That had become an old story and it
didn't worry us. After all the fine rest we
had had we were in fighting trim and eager for
trouble. At 11 :40 we were ready and waiting,
and most of the lads braced themselves with a
couple of drams of firewater. Sharp when the
hour came we went over.

We ran into the heaviest kind of firing and
lost a good many men on the way. A bullet
struck Piccadilly's helmet and knocked him
over, but he was up again unhurt the next mo-
ment. The Germans climbed out of their trench
to meet us, and we went into them fast and hard.

I got my bayonet into one of them and
couldn't get it out. Another one was coming
for me, so I put a foot on Fritzie 's chest, pulled
with all the strength I had, and out the bayonet
came just in time. The other chap was running
for me and was so close that I didn't have time
to get ready for him, so I dodged, and he missed
me by a foot. He turned and came at me again,

206 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and then I got liim. He was a big one, too big
and clumsy for bayonet work. I was glad I
was small and wiry when I saw what easy
marks some of the fat giants were. After a few
minutes we had won their trench and a lot of
prisoners with it, and it had been easy work.

Our prisoners told us they were tired of the
war. Some of them hadn't liked it even when
it began and they were not the soldier kind.
One was a solemn-faced, middle-aged chap with
big spectacles whom we called the professor.
He had been a piano teacher in Germany, and
he said the sight of blood made him sick. He
was a gentle old boy, and it made me laugh to
think of him trying to kill anybody with his
bayonet. He had surrendered without even
putting up a fight.

But we knew too much about Kaiser Bill's
army to think that many of them were such easy
ones, though our hardest lesson from them was
still ahead of us.

CHAPTER XXVII

NOW I come to a time when the luck that
had brought so many of us through alive
and unhurt would have little more to do with
the Fighting Fifth ; a time that makes me won-
der, when I look back upon it, that I am here
among the living instead of lying under the
daisies in France, where, by all but one of a
thousand chances, I should be today.

The German lines grew stronger and stronger
as we lay there before them, and their artillery
gave us no rest day or night. And yet we were
to go forward. Those were the orders. We
were to go forward, no matter what the cost,
and we knew that many a lad of ours would go
west before the fighting there was over.

For hours at a time the shells flew over our
heads or dropped among us, while we crouched
on our knees in the bottom of the trench with
our hands over our eyes, thinking every minute
would be our last. The shell-fire shook our

207

208 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

nerves and took the heart out of ns. It wouldn't
let us sleep, and sometimes it wouldn't let us
eat, for in the thick of it bringing the food up
from the cook-houses was a job too hard to han-
dle. We thanked our stars when our o^vn artil-
lery grew strong and gave the Huns shell for
shell, though we knew that that meant the time
was nearer when we should have to go over
the top into the hardest fighting of all.

At last the German fire grew weaker, and our
own big guns began to bellow worse than ever.
They were clearing the way for us poor Tom-
mies and giving us a chance against death. The
sound of them was like music then, for we knew
that every bark they gave made easier work for
us and perhaps another gap or two in the
trenches lying ahead.

Then the day came when we were told we were
going in. And we were going in by the light
of day, a gray day, to be sure, but much too
clear to please us. Four forty was the time
set, and we went over the top on the minute.

The Huns were ready for us, and they gave
us such a dose of shells and bullets as I had
never gone through before. We were not
through our fences when the lads began to drop,

I MEET ^^ ISRAEL HANDS'' 209

and one went down who was running shoulder
to shoulder with me. He was a lad I knew
well, but there was no chance to stop and help
him or even to make sure whether he was dead
or wounded. It was every man shift for him-
self, and it was lie there and suffer and wait
for the stretcher-bearers when you fell wounded,
or perhaps for a Grerman to run a bayonet
through you if we were beaten back.

A hot, stinging blow, a bullet cutting through
the skin of my forehead, staggered me and
blood came trickling down over my face. I ran
on, but the bullets were flying so thick that I
couldn't see a chance of getting across. Dead
and wounded men were everywhere, and the
Fighting Fifth would be lucky if it wasn 't wiped
out. The blood half blinded me and I began to
feel afraid, for I knew that if I couldn't keep
my eyes clear I should stand a small chance
when it came to the hand-to-hand work.

Half way across a bullet hit me in the thigh
and I fell. I felt no pain to amount to much,
but I couldn 't move. Our lads ran on and left
me, and from where I lay I watched them being
mowed down.

Then I saw their line break and some come

210 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

back, but the rest ran on into what looked like
sure death. As they drew near the trench the
Germans came over the top with a yell, and went
at them. Our lads were outnumbered three to
one, but they fought till the last one of them was
down or captured.

The Huns came on, trampling on the dead and
wounded, and I was lucky to escape their feet
as they passed me. I saw them driving what
were left of our men back into the trench, and
I went cold as I thought of the bloody work
they were doing with the bayonets to our poor
lads.

I was growing dizzy and weak, and oh, what
a thirst I had ! There was water in my bottle,
but I didn't have the strength to lift it to my
lips. Near by was a wounded man dragging
himself along with his arms, for his legs had
gone bad. Close beside me he stopped, his
strength going fast.

*^I can't go another yard, matie,'' he whis-
pered, * * and I 'm done for. We 're all done for,
those of us that are out here, for the Huns mil
be back presently, and it's small pity they show
to the wounded. They '11 fix us with their bayo-

I MEET '^ ISRAEL HANDS" 211

nets, like as not. IVe seen them do that to the
wounded more than once. ' ^

I asked him for a drink. Little I cared then
what the Huns might do to us ; all I could think
about was water. My life I would have given
that moment, I think, for one swallow of cold
water, and the bottle hanging by his side drove
me half mad. He tried to raise himself up on
his elbows again that he might crawl to me, but
he was too weak to manage it.

^ ^ I can 't do it, ma tie, ' ' he said. * ^ I can 't even
reach the old bottle, and I'm half dead for a
drink myself. ' '

He was silent for a time, but before long I
heard him groaning and calling for water in a
voice that was not above a whisper.

It grew dark, and the stars came out. The
man beside me was gasping for air and now
and then muttering to himself. I lay staring
up at the sky, and it seemed as if there were a
iire inside of me burning me up. After a long
time I heard steps, and some Germans passed
by a few yards off. They prowled about in
plain sight, and as I watched them, not caring
whether they found me or left me to lie there

212 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and thirst, I saw the dreadful thing happen that
I had heard of so often. They were running
their bayonets into the wounded.

A cold shiver went through me, and the sky
and the shell-holes and craters and the far-off
hills began to go round and round.

Then the stars went out, and I was back home,
sitting up in bed reading about Jim Hawkins
and hurrying over the pages for fear my mother
would come stealing in and take the candle
away.

After a time the room dropped away into the
dark, and I was Jim Hawkins himself, sitting
on the cross-trees of the good ship Hispaniola,
with Israel Hands below me coming up the
mizzen-shrouds holding a dirk in his teeth.

* * Jim, ' ' says he, ^ ' I reckon we 're fouled, you
and me, and we'll have to sign articles. I'd
have had you but for that there lurch; but I
don 't have no luck, not I ; and I reckon I '11 have
to strike, which comes hard for a master mariner
to a ship's younker like you, Jim."

All in a breath his hand went back over his
shoulder, and the dirk sung through the air.

Of a sudden Israel Hands' red cap changed
to a helmet and the dirk became the butt of a

I MEET ^^ ISRAEL HANDS'^ 213

gun. The gun-butt struck me on top of the
head, I felt a stinging pain, and everything went
black.

I came to in a dug-out hospital, where an M. 0.
■ — a medical officer — and a woman nurse were
standing beside me.

*^How goes the fighting f I asked.

*^ Suppose you keep your mouth shut and lie
quiet, ' ^ the M. 0. answered. ^ * You Ve been rav-
ing about the fighting ever since we got you,
and it's better you should think of something
else.''

The nurse spoke a few words to him in
French.

*'I'll tell you this much," said the M. 0. as
he turned to me again; ^'your battalion came
back at the Huns and fought like wildcats.
They cleaned the devils out, and, after driving
them back where they came from, took a good
part of their first line away from them.
They've more than made up for getting beaten,
and they are the proudest men in the army to-
day."

**And then the stretcher-bearers picked me
up!"

**No; a nurse found you — a French woman.

214 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

She carried you in herself. You had been ly-
ing out there forty-eight hours, and we thought
you were done for when w^e got you here.
There's a nasty scratch over your eyes, a wound
in your thigh and a dent in your head from the
butt of a gun, but you needn't worry. You'll
pull through in time. ' '

I went under an operation a few minutes later,
and twenty-four hours passed before I came
back to consciousness. A nurse asked me where
I lived and I tried to answer, but I found I
couldn't say a word. For two days and nights
I lay mthout speaking; then suddenly my
speech came back to me.

*^How goes the fighting!" I asked.

^^We're giving the Germans hell," said the
M. 0.

CHAPTER XXVIII

' '\^OU'EE going back to Blighty/' the M. 0.
X told me a few hours later.

^^Whenr^

' * Oh, in two or three days you will be on the
way."

**How goes the fighting nowT'

**Our line is still moving forward. Your
Fighting Fifth has carried another trench, I
hear. They deserve their name, those lads, for
they've done great work. You should be
proud you were one of them.''

I could feel every nerve in me tingle as I
heard him praise our brave old battalion.
Small need there was of his saying I should be
proud to be one of them. There wasn't a
prouder lad in the army.

As I lay there in the dug-out listening to the
artillery I wondered how many we had lost and
whether any of my pals had fallen. More
wounded were being brought in, but the few I

215

216 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

managed to see I didn't recognize. Before
many hours the big guns stopped booming, and
I knew the fighting must be over for a time.

I had been in the dug-out three days when the
M. 0. told me that before night they were go-
ing to start me off toward BHghty. I didn't
want to go without seeing some of my pals, and
I told him so. The M. 0. shook his head. He
said he didn't see how it would be possible.
But, a little before the time came for me to
start, in came Billy, McBride and Piccadilly.
I don't know how they managed it, but there
they were, just as much alive as ever. I told
them I was going back to Blighty.

^' Never mind. Mascot," the Yankee lad said.
*^You won't miss much, for the war is soon go-
ing to be over. The Americans are coming in,
and that'll settle it. Why, son, I know regi-
ments back in New York that could lick their
weight in wildcats. Ever hear of the Seventh
or the Sixty-ninth? Believe me, Kaiser Bill
will yell for help when he sees them coming for
him."

**If you're a fair sample, 'ow is it yer turned
tail so quick w'en the Germans was drivin' us
back?" Piccadilly asked, his eyes snapping.

^^ GOOD-BYE, OLD PALS!'' 217

* * Me r ' said Mac, looking surprised. ' * Why,
I was holding 'em till there wasn't a man left
to back me up. All the same, Pickie old sport,
the Fifth's done pretty well in this war con-
sidering there's been only one Yank to help

Piccadilly was boiling mad by this time.

^'I'd ^Yank' yer if I 'ad yer outer 'ere," he
growled. ^* 'Ave ye forgot this is a 'orspital
we're in and no place for your boastinT'

They were working up to the fighting point
and they might have reached it if a nurse had
not told them to make peace and be quiet.

*^ Those two are always going at each other
like that," Billy explained to the M. 0., who
had come up to find out what the trouble was
about. ^^They don't mean anything by it.
It's just a habit of theirs that they can't break.
It don't make any difference where they are.
They'll be jawing each other the same way in
Heaven, if they ever get there."

^'Tell the youngster what's been going on
since he's been here," said the M. 0.

^*It would take a week to tell it," Mac an-
swered. ** Believe me, son, you've missed a lot.
We've been mopping the Boches up fast. Some

218 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

scrapping! Wow! I got three with my bayo-
net inside of three minutes.'^

* ^You're a liar/^ Piccadilly put in, keeping
his voice low since the nurse had told him to
be peaceful and quiet. '^ 'Twas meself that got
three, and you got none at all, as you know
well.'^

^^Let it pass,'' said Mac, keeping the tail of
his eye on the M. 0. ^^It don't matter. Maybe
I made a mistake in the count. But anyway
it was some scrapping."

^'Big Tom's out of it for good," Billy told
me. ''Got hit in the arm. He's going back
to Blighty. We'll all be back there soon if it
keeps up like this. ' '

''I'm thinking it's time to say good-bye,"
Piccadilly said. "They told us not to stay
long. ' '

He held out a grimy hand as big as the two
of mine.

' ' Good-bye, old pals, ' ' I said. " I '11 be think-
ing about you back in Blighty."

Then they each said good-bye and a few words
to cheer me, and marched out. As they went I
heard Piccadilly say:

"Wot are we goin' to do for a mascot now?

*^ GOOD-BYE, OLD PALS!'' 219

We'll 'ave to get a dog, or a cat or something.
Any kind of animal will do to bring us luck. ' '

A little later I and a number of other wounded
lads were carried out and put into a ^ ^ shaker, ' '
and away we rolled for the railroad. I learned
then why they called the ambulances ^ ^ shakers. ' '
The life was almost shaken out of me before
we had gone half a mile. Every time the thing
bumped or lurched a chorus of groans went up,
and one chap fainted and didn't come to all the
rest of the ride. Every jolt set my wounds
throbbing and paining till I wished the Boches
had done for me for good and all and had saved
me from all that misery. It took two dreadful
hours to get to the railroad, and we were all half
dead by that time.

The train wasn't much better than the
* * shaker, ' ' though being full of wounded it trav-
elled slowly. The wound of the lad next to me
was bleeding, and his eyes were closed. I
think he must have passed out before we got
to the end of the journey. Even now I never
think of that ride without a shiver, and I can
still hear the cries and groans that sounded all
day long around me.

At last they carried us out and into the base

220 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

hospital at Boulogne, and the place was Heaven
after the ^'shaker'' and the train. There were
clean white sheets to lie in — the first I had
seen since leaving England — and good food, and
everything to make us comfortable. But there
was one thing I missed, the noise of the guns.
The stillness got on my nerves. If I could have
heard artillery going good and strong and ma-
chine guns rattling outside the windows the
place would not have seemed so strange and I
should have rested easier.

The nurses gathered round my cot the first
day I was there to get a look at me, for I was
the only patient they had had of my age and
there was much talk of the ^'boy soldier,''
though it was little I felt like a boy after all I
had been through. Small I was, and young,
but I felt ten years older than before we went
into the trenches at Ypres, and I had seen more
trouble than many a man does in a lifetime.

One morning I was lying in my cot, staring up
at the ceiling, when a big shadow fell across me
and a voice I knew well cried out, *^Why, bless
my blooming eyes, if it isn't the Mascot!"

It was Big Tom, looking as healthy and
strong as an ox, though one of his arms was in

^^ GOOD-BYE, OLD PALS!" 221

a sling. For a time lie stood beside me, telling
of his last fight and of how he got his wound,
and then lumbered off to board the boat that
was to take him back to England.

Two weeks I lay in the Boulogne hospital,
and then the day came when they shipped me
for old Blighty. It was a fine, clear day, with
a breeze blowing strong and salty from the
sea, and the wounded were all happy the time
had come when they were to see their friends
and families again. Out on the pier some of
them were singing feebly, ^^Take Me Back to
Dear Old Blighty," and ^^The Ship That's
Bound for England."

It was a hard crossing for us all, for the
boat rolled up and down in the big sea swells
till I wished myself back at Boulogne. I was
in bed on the upper deck, strapped down with
weights, with not a soul to talk to and noth-
ing to do but listen to the chugging of the en-
gines and the splashing of the sea. Out in
mid-channel I overheard a nurse saying that
three operations were going on at that very
moment and that a wounded man had passed
west a few minutes before. Then people came
hurrying past me talking of a submarine that

222 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

was chasing us, and I diSn't know for a time
whether it was Blighty or the bottom of the sea
I was going to. But the submarine dropped
out of sight, and at last we steamed into Dover.
There we landed, but we were soon afloat again
on the way to Folkestone and London.

I heard the little river steamers chugging as
we went up the Thames, and the breezes from
the fields of old England were in our faces, and
I felt like a lad coming out of a dream, and a
bad one, with the war so far away and home so
near.

CHAPTEK XXIX

I MEET THE KING

''Up to mighty London came an Irish lad one day."

SO the good old song goes; but he wasn^t
wounded and flat on his back as I was.

As far back as I could remember I had
longed to see the greatest city in the world.
When I was a very young lad — not more than
eight or ten — I had been near to running away
from home to find my way to it and to stay
there until I had had a good look at the King.
A cat may look at a king, and so could I if ever
I could find my way to the Buckingham Palace
gate and should wait there long enough. And
here I was at last in mighty London with small
chance of seeing any of its wonders or of get-
ting to Buckingham Palace or anywhere else
but a hospital.

The boat came into her pier, and I could hear
them making her fast. In a few minutes I was
put on a stretcher and carried down the gang-
plank in a long line of wounded.

223

224 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

I heard cheers, and, lifting my head a bit,
I saw a great crowd of people. They were there
to welcome us — men, women and children, thou-
sands of them. Then the stretcher-bearers
stopped, and, looking up again, I saw, close by,
a small, bearded man in a general's uniform
standing in the centre of a group of officers.
He came up to me and held out his hand.

It was the King. The King of England was
shaking hands with me, a poor, wounded
Tommy !

^^How do you feelf he asked.

For a moment I couldn't find my voice, and
the thought was running through my head,
*' What would they think back home if they knew
the King was speaking to me?" At last I
managed to say, though not much above a whis-
per,

^^I am all right, sir.''

He looked at me for a moment with very
serious eyes.

**Your age?" he asked.

I told him, and he gave a little start of sur-
prise.

** Sixteen! So young!" he said. ^^At your
age you should never have been there. But.

I MEET THE KING 225

my boy, if all the men of England showed such
spirit we should soon win the war. '^

He made way for some one, and I saw the
Queen beside me. She gave me her hand and
passed on. As she disappeared the officers
came crowding up to shake hands with me, and
then the King saluted us and turned away.

That is how I met King George. Small
chance that ever I should shake his hand again,
but I had that moment to remember for the
rest of my life. A finer man I never spoke with.
May his reign be long. God save the King !

The line of stretchers moved on, and when my
mind had cleared a bit from the excitement I
began to wonder what Billy and Piccadilly and
the rest of the lads would say if they heard
King George himself had spoken with me. I
felt sorry for those poor chaps, facing the shells
and bullets and sleeping with the rats in the
trenches, while here I was, welcomed by the
King and Queen and their officers and cheered
as a hero by the crowds.

A line of sixty ambulance motor cars was
waiting for us, and, three of us in each car, we
moved slowly away for St. George ^s Hospital.
The streets were black with people, and they

226 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

cheered us as we passed, and threw cigarettes
and flowers into the cars. Men stood with
bared heads as we went by, and many a woman
had her handkerchief to her eyes. There was
good cause for their tears, for more than one
poor lad among u^ was near to death and knew
nothing of the welcome he was getting as we
moved on through the shadows of the great
buildings.

At the hospital the nurses made much of me.
They treated me as if I were only a child, and
each of them gave me a kiss, though it was lit-
tle of the child that was left in me after the
life in the trenches. There was an American
doctor there, Dr. Eansom, who told me he had
no doubt that I was the youngest soldier in the
British Army, and it may have been so. I knew
I had been the youngest at Ypres and also at
Arras, and, though I had heard of one or two'
lads under age who were in the war, they were
older than I.

The whole city was ours from the day we
arrived. Perhaps we should soon be forgot-
ten, but for those days we lay in the hospital
we were heroes, honoured and admired. The
Lord Mayor came to see us, and he gave me a

I MEET THE KING 227

one-pound note, besides distributing pipes, to-
bacco and cigarettes among the rest. Then a
company of the Black Watch paid us a visit and
talked with us of our life at the front. One day
we had a concert, when some famous actors
joined in entertaining us. Being wounded was
not so bad after all.

For almost three months I lay there in the
hospital. When at last I was able to get to my
feet again there was no uniform that could be
found to fit me. My old one had been burned
up, so I had to stay indoors until a nurse one
day brought me a new one made to my measure.
It fitted like a glove, and that night I went to
a great ball at the Lord Mayor ^s house to which
five hundred soldiers from the hospitals had
been invited.

Oh, that was a sight worth seeing, stranger to
me than the trenches or the battlefields and more
full of interest. It was nearer to being a palace
than any place I had ever been in. All ablaze
with lights it was. Hundreds of beautiful
women were dancing, and everywhere were of-
ficers of high rank, their breasts covered with
decorations, with now and then the greatest
prize of all, the Victoria Cross, among them.

228 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

and there were tables piled high mth food and
sweets in great dishes of silver and gold.

Then a new order came that as the soldiers in
the hospitals received no pay they could go to
any theatre free. I lost no time in going to
Drury Lane with a nurse, where we saw * * Seven
Days^ Leave. ^' When it wasn't the theatre it
was a motor drive or a football game, and wher-
ever we went the crowds cheered us and show-
ered us with cigarettes and flowers.

Oh, London was good to us wounded Tom-
mies ! London had a big heart and remembered
what we had been through in mud and rain
among the bullets and the shells.

CHAPTER XXX

THE LAST ADVENTURE

AT last came my discharge from the army
as unfit for service, and I went home
with fifty-six pounds in my pocket and the prom-
ise of a pension of a pound a week.

As I came to Amelia Street, my eyes busy
with all the old, familiar sights, I brushed
against a stout young chap who was leaning
against a wall eating cookies out of a paper
bag. It was Jimmie Kelly, a lad who had been
a pal of mine when we went to school together.

* ^ Hello ! ' ' he said. ' * I hear you Ve been in the
war.*'

^^I'm just back from it,'' I answered, and
pointed to the service medal on my coat.

*'And did you see any of the fighting?'' he
asked.

I had to laugh at him. Did I see any of the
fighting! I told him I had killed a few Ger-
mans myself, and had lain wounded for forty-
eight hours out in No Man's Land.

22&

230 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

^* Are ye fooling T' says he.

I showed him the wound on my head, and his
eyes grew bigger and bigger.

I left him standing there, and when I turned
around for another look at him he had dropped
the bag of cookies on the walk and was staring
after me with his mouth open. I was begin-
ning to find out what it was like to be coming
home a hero, and I threw my chest out and held
my head high as I marched up to the old house
where I knew my mother was waiting. The
door flew open, and there she stood, with her
arms held out for me. It was the greatest day
of her life, she said, and, though she had visited
me in the hospital, she couldn't look at me
enough nor hear too much of all that I had been
through.

In the evening many of the neighbours came
in, and I had to tell my story all over again.
Old Mr. Kelly, who was past eighty if he was a
day, and fairly deaf, sat close in front of me, his
whiskers almost in my face and a hand to his
ear. When I had got through with what we
had done at Ypres and with how the shells and
bullets and bayonets had more than once come
near to wiping us out, he piped up, *'But did ye

THE LAST ADVENTURE 231

see any of the fighting, lad ? ' ' And I had to tell
it once more, shouting it into his ear.

One day I happened to be at the Sailors'
Home, where a ship's officer asked me to take
a job with him. I asked where the ship was
going.

^^To the United States," said he. ^^ She's
the Cuthhert, of the Booth line. We need a
coal passer. You'll do."

' ^ I '11 go, " I said, and the next day we sailed,
although my mother warned me again that I
should keep away from the sea.

There were three other coal passers on the
Cuthhert. We worked in shifts, two of us to
a shift, four hours on and eight off. No army
mules ever worked harder than we did, as we
rolled barrels of coal from the bunkers to the
fires.

Stripped to the waist we were, and dripping
wet with the heat. When I thought I could
stand it no longer the fires would send a hotter
wave than ever over me, till my head grew dizzy
and I gasped for a breath of cool air; never a
moment for even a word, for the fires were al-
ways hungry for more.

The two of us were black with coal dust from

232 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

our hair to the waist-line, with only the whites
of our eyes showing through all the grime. The
lads of the ** Scruffy Fifth'' should have seen
me then. We had been clean — white as snow —
in the trenches at Ypres compared with what I
was down there in the bunkers.

At last the shift would change, and old Peter,
the man who worked with me on the job, would
go with me to the deck to cool off. For a time I
would lie there half dead from the hard work
and the heat, but old Peter had been a coal
passer since he was a boy and didn't mind it a
bit. He had never known what any other kind
of a job was. Almost all his life he had spent
down in the hold of a ship. I showed him my
service badge and my discharge papers, and
told him of what I had seen of the war and of
my meeting with the King.

*^And King George shook your 'and?" said
old Peter.

^^He did that," said I.

He puffed his pipe for a few moments with-
out a word. Then he held out his hand to me.

*'Boy, I'm askin' ye to let me shake the 'and
that shook the 'and of the King," he said.
*' 'Twill be something to remember."

THE LAST ADVENTURE 233

One day we were up on deck resting, when
suddenly old Peter jumped to his feet.

**Look, lad!^' he cried. ^ ^They're after

us

P'

Off a few hundred yards or so I saw a sub-
marine rising like a whale out of the water.
Then v/e saw the wake of a torpedo. There
were two ships behind us, and from one of them
came the sound of an explosion. In the same
moment our gunners began to fire, and we put
on full steam to run for safety.

The stern of the ship that had been struck
was dipping deep into the water. She was
sinking; there was no doubt of that, but it was
against orders to stop to help her. We should
have been sunk ourselves if we had done so.

The next minute another torpedo came rush-
ing through the water headed straight for us.

^^It's going to get us,'' cried Peter; and I
thought he was right and made up my mind to
jump into the sea. I held my breath as I
watched the thing coming. We were going fast,
and there was just a chance that it might miss
us, but it looked to me as if it were going to
strike amidships.

It missed us. We saw it pass our stern, not

234 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

ten yards away. And in the same moment the
sinking ship behind us shot out a great cloud
of steam and dropped out of sight like a stone.

A shell came screeching over our decks ; then
another, and again we thought we were lost.
But we were giving the Germans as good as
they sent, and they were beginning to submerge.
In the next minute the danger was over.

We learned that word had reached our cap-
tain that the sea ahead of us was full of danger,
and we turned far out of our course to get
around the waiting submarines. The next day
old Peter told me we were headed south and
were already off our path by at least a hundred
miles.

More than a week late because of the round-
about course we had taken, we steamed into New
York Harbour on a clear, sunny morning, and
the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers lay
before us like stage scenery.

Not a soul did I know in America, and after
leaving the ship I roamed the streets feeling
lonely and a bit homesick, not knowing where
to go or what to do next. At last I came to a
crowd of people, who were listening to a sol-
dier making a speech. I edged my way up to

THE LAST ADVENTURE 235

the front, and before long the speaker caught
sight of the service badge on my coat.

*^I'll bet that chap has been in the war/' he
called out. **Come up here and tell this crowd
w^hat youVe seen, and help the Eed Cross
drive. ' '

So I climbed up the steps to where he stood.
Little I knew what to say, and I began to shake
w^ith stage fright as I saw all the people star-
ing at me.

^^ Brace up, sport,'' said the man who had
asked me up, ^^and if you've seen any fighting
tell 'em about it. That 's the stuff they want. ' '

All in a breath my thoughts went back to the
trenches and to the long marches, and I told
them of how we had fought at Ypres and Arras,
of the homeless women and children and of the
nurse who had lost her hands. They cheered
and shouted for more, and men and women went
down into their pockets to give to the Red Cross
fund.

When the meeting was over the soldier took
me in tow and introduced me to a lot of peo-
ple, and I became a regular speaker for the Red
Cross and the Liberty Loan. One evening after
I had been telling my story a red-headed chap

236 THE FIGHTING MASCOT

came up to me and said he had a cousin in the
Fifth Liverpool named McBride. He asked if
I knew him.

**Sure I know him,'' I said. ^^It was from
thinking of all he told me about his bear hunt-
ing and gold digging that I made up my mind to
come to America. He's been a great hunter
of big game, that lad. ' '

*^Yeah?" said the red-headed man. **Why,
son, that cousin of mine is the darnedest liar
that ever came down the pike. The only big
game he's ever seen is muskrats up on the old
farm. He's never been west of Hackensack."

So perhaps I won't go bear-hunting or gold
digging after all, though I am still hunting for
adventure.

It's the life in the old trenches that is calling
me now, and glad I should be to go back to it.
But I am on the wounded list as unfit for service.
Whenever I am alone my mind turns to Billy,
and Piccadilly and the rest of the lads I knew,
and I grow sad thinking that I shall never be
with them there again and that my fighting days
are over for good and all.

Often at night queer dreams come to me, and
I am with them in the fighting lines once more

THE LAST ADVENTURE 237

and I hear the big guns going as we lie in the
mud and rain. And sometimes, when the shell
shock that came to me at Arras has been shaking
up my nerves a bit, I start up from my sleep,
groping in the dark for my gun, with the voices
of the Tommies in the stone house ringing in my
ears:
' ' Put the steel to 'im ! Put the steel to 'im ! ' '

THE END

THE NEW
REF

This book is
tak

YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
ERBNCE DEPARTMENT

under no circumstances to be
en from the Building

,

'

- • ^ :

tm *JM

^^^

•

follM 410

I

i||||g||i;g|l||||i|